More on Collaboration

What has your experience been with collaboration and what are your thoughts about your experiences?

I am a certified Elementary Education (K-6) and Music (K-12) teacher.  My current teaching assignment is vocal and general music for grades K-6 with life skills and language support inclusion.  I enjoy collaboration with my colleagues, and find it to be essential in keeping my teaching relevant to the curriculum in other core areas.  By collaborating with my colleagues, I can support the mathematics, language arts, science, and social studies curriculum through music. 

The student teacher/cooperative teacher relationship is meant to be a collaboration. Because I mentor new music teachers in our district, and serve as a cooperating teacher to student teachers, I have created a music education blog to further facilitate collaboration with new teachers within my discipline.  My blog is a terrific tool to foster collaboration with teachers who do not teach within the same buildings, as is common with music teachers. 

Another great tool for collaborating is Google Docs, which allows multiple authors to edit a document. Again, this is an easy way for me to collaborate with a colleague who does not work within my building.

This is another great question to prepare for an interview.  School districts want to hire team players who can work well with others!  What will you be able to tell them about collaboration in your past teaching experiences? What can you say about your plans to collaborate with colleagues once you are (hopefully!) hired by the district?