Speaker 1: A couple brief things, we have the agenda over there, some things we wanted to bring up. We only got half an hour, so we'll do our best to use our time efficiently.

Speaker 2: When teachers talk to each other, teachers learn from each other. There's so many great ideas that our teachers come up with that engage kids, get kids to think outside of the box, that I'm just amazed at what we can accomplish when we work together. Individuals create great ideas, but really to move schools forward, I believe that everyone needs to be together and in dialoguing with each other and creating a conversation about how to best serve students.

Speaker 1: I feel really fortunate that at our school we have grade level prep, which means that every day all the sixth grade teachers are able to discuss various topics, whether that be student concerns we have or how to better integrate curriculum. Here is what remains of the weather balloon, we're really excited. This is actually pretty much everything minus the balloon itself. Last year, an engineering teacher and myself thought it would be really great to have a sort of science engineering crossover project where we launched a high altitude weather balloon way up into the stratosphere with the intention of getting some unique data to help reinforce sixth grade topics of watershed studies and whatnot.

Speaker 3: Three, two, one, launch.

Speaker 1: And here is the tree it landed on somewhere in the Klickitat. It went somewhere in between, and that's what we're going to try to show to everyone using this data that everyone's pawing through right now. I definitely had a pretty clear idea in mind of what I wanted to do on retrieving our weather balloon, and it was great to bring the topic to the rest of the team to find out how we could connect it to language arts and other content areas. Yesterday we were able to make a crossover connection to math, I was having students actually looking through the data, and I was trying to rack my brain about how we might make more of a robust language arts connection, but that's not my strength, I was wondering if you guys had any ideas.

Speaker 3: I think we could also do a really cool imagination piece with the travel of that too. I agree.

Speaker 4: Look at the pictures, trace the path of it, tell the story. But I think it's a great way to bring in the scientific writing too, I mean you could do both, you could take both these lines. You could do the same type of writing for both of them, one would be scientific writing and one would be creative writing, and basically we're inspired by one single experience and how could you look at it from different perspectives.

Speaker 2: That'd be cool. You have to provide the structure for collaboration, that's essential. You can't have collaboration if teachers don't have time to collaborate. And so by tweaking a master schedule, you can provide opportunities for collaboration. That collaboration leads to great things.

Speaker 5: Because of that common prep time, it allows every team to plan field trips that allow them to figure out how do we relate the curriculum within the different subject areas. So you remember we went on the field trip, that was gathering data for helping the kids understand science based on where we live and our unique geology in the gorge.

Speaker 3: When the science teachers decided to do this geology unit on land formations, we saw the opportunity as language arts teachers to bring the idea of the legends that explain these into reading and language arts so they could write a legend and then perform it. And they could choose to work alone or in partners or in a group and they've done skits and storybooks and comic strips and puppet shows and iMovies. So yeah.

Speaker 5: Are those recorded somewhere that we can watch?

Speaker 6: We took a trip and it was meant to be for science and then in this class we're writing like legends about Beacon Rock and Wachella Falls and like how whatever gorge came to be.

Speaker 5: The effect for the kids is they hear common messages rather than it being discrete classrooms and subjects and teachers and classes. They see it all relating together.

Speaker 1: It is incredibly important to allow teachers to collaborate and work together not only to enrich the learning of all their students but ourselves as professionals.