Several years ago, the teachers at International found students' limited English language ability to be a persuasive reason to organize the school into small teams and to organize the curriculum for interdisciplinary depth. As a school, we decided, okay, this is the way we're going to go. Now, six teams of six teachers each have extraordinary authority to manage the education of their particular 75 students for the year. Each team meets three hours a week, to develop and revise their interdisciplinary curriculum, share successful practices and troubleshoot problems, allocate a team budget, hire and mentor new teachers for the team, and discuss, or case manage, individual students. If students are having trouble, International does not have a dean's office to send them to.
Kids belong to the team.
You can imagine, especially for a new teacher, how wonderful that is. Case management is a great way to make sure kids don't fall through the cracks. Teachers don't fall through the cracks either. In addition to the support of team members, new teachers often find themselves team teaching their first year. Additional support, in the form of peer evaluation, occurs annually for teachers' first two years at International and then every third year.