I start every class with a shareout on how their day went, to acknowledge that they are full time, trained teachers who already worked 8 hours. At first, this shareout took 10 minutes and everyone was brief, but they are comfortable enough with me and each other that we have a pretty animated group discussion every day. Today we went on for 40 minutes until I shut it down. Teachers are sharing successes and also bringing issues they want to work through and they are becoming more of a collaborative community. I consider this to be an excellent trend for such a short time.
Also, almost everyone is trying out the activities I have worked on in their schools. They are sincerely trying to get students speaking and listening using all kinds of tricks -- games, pair work, call and response. Most encouraging is that their efforts are not perfect but the students are requesting more activities involving communication and they seem to be more engaged in their learning. The students don't seem to mind that the activities are messier than they are used to, and the teachers seem less worried about experimenting, making mistakes, and then doing better the next time. I am explicitly working on problem solving with them.
We also began planning a project-based unit, and they are nervous and skeptical about the scope of this project. It really is way too far our of their zones of development right now, but I'm going to continue through and then slow it down again and see what I can do with this. I am trying to do a project in the other class i'm teaching and they are interested in following my efforts there.
Most of my goals are being achieved to this point, so the main challenge for me is to keep moving forward without moving too fast.
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