Collaborative Teaching:

The Best Response to a Rigid Curriculum

By Monique D. Wild, Amanda S. Mayeaux, & Kathryn P. Edmonds

Like many of our education colleagues around the country, we have struggled with the constraints brought on by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, initially seeing its demands for consistency as the enemy of classroom creativity and innovation. Like several of our fellow teachers, we viewed the law’s directives as threats likely to suck every shred of imagination out of our instruction. But as we persisted in our work, we discovered that we could meet the challenges posed by the law with a powerful tool honed during our collective 37 years in education: collaborative teaching. In fact, we now believe that working together creatively is the only way to meet the ambitious goals of NCLB and state and district standards.

It is collaborative teaching that enabled us to draw on our individual and group strengths, divide work into manageable chunks, and conquer the obstacles of overloaded curriculum frameworks and high-stakes tests, all while holding ourselves accountable for results. Our collaborative efforts at Dutchtown Middle School in Geismar, La., also led to our selection as the first team ever to win the Disney Teacher of the Year award. While grateful for the honor and the professional opportunities that followed, we were most excited by being nationally recognized for our efforts as an interdisciplinary partnership.

The centerpiece of our collaborative teaching had always been showing students how the concepts and skills they learn in one class relate to all the others—and why those ideas matter. Although we’d been planning our classroom units for years, the process became much more difficult when our district adopted the Louisiana Comprehensive Curriculum outlining what content students had to learn in each subject and the specific weeks in which we had to teach those concepts. We were pretty sure this rigid curriculum framework would spell the end of our interdisciplinary units, but once we rolled up our sleeves and started working with the state documents, we found that the opposite was true. Not only could we continue to create these units, we could improve them. Ironically, the inflexible curriculum helped us see the wisdom of making our lessons even more...