I work at an intermediate school (5th and 6th grades). Our student body is divided into “teams” with three teachers per team – a math teacher, science/social studies teacher, and a language arts/reading teacher. Each grade has 5 teams. Because the three teachers on a team work with the same students (60-90 students that rotate among them), they meet regularly to discuss the students on their team, upcoming school events, etc. Typically they meet formally at least once per week, during a conference period, but they also meet informally a lot more than that – between classes, have lunch together, stay after school together to work on a team project, etc. Also, the subject area teachers meet weekly, so, for example, all the 5th grade math teachers meet formally once a week to discuss issues pertaining to their subject area, like developing the lesson plan for next week, issues they’ve been having teaching a topic, resource swapping, etc. Our school also has academic clubs, so a kid can join the 5th grade science club (for example) and all the 5th grade science teachers would sponsor the club, taking turns with duties/responsibilities, so some collaboration must routinely take place with that. The staff meets as a group, typically twice a month, depending on the need. These are usually reserved for big changes, like a change in administrative staff, a campus-wide procedural change (duty shedule), or training. The principal also sends out a campus-wide email each Monday morning that has anything we really need to know for the week and a list of important dates (field trips, testing days, etc.). We also have a campus testing coordinator who meets with all the teachers regularly to train them with testing procedures, developing benchmark tests, and so on. Then you have teachers in specific areas that must coordinate often with other teachers, like the teacher that runs the content mastery lab, the gifted and talented teacher, the person who runs the ARDs, the ESL teacher, special education, and so forth. Most is done either face-to-face or via email, just depending on what the need is. Seriously, I spend almost as much time in meetings each day as I do teaching students. Hope this helps.

I am an intervention specialist for gifted students. Since I serve students in several different classrooms in grades 3-6, collaboration with their homeroom teachers is vital. Thankfully, our schedule is set up in such a way that I have common planning time with each of the grade-level teams for at least 30 minutes each week. During that time, we plan major units together, plan for how we will use our collaborative time in the classroom, and plan ways to build differentiation into the lessons they will be teaching on their own. While we occassionally need to touch base between meetings via email or over lunch, the common planning time is an essential part of making our collaboration successful.