To ensure that students get the support they need, the Collaborative Teaching Community (CTC) initiative will be piloted in the fall of 2013 for freshman. Participating faculty members will collaborate regularly to discuss students’ support needs.

In the present curriculum, teachers do not get the opportunity to meet with other teachers of a particular student. CTC will ensure that teachers understand the other challenges a student is going through academically. This change benefits teachers who would otherwise individually teach a class.

Students will get the attention they need from all teachers. Teachers meeting with each other to talk about students seems logical––and we support the CTC program.

History teacher Gregory Drake said, “The idea right now is every teacher is working hard on their own. If a student is struggling, then I have to go around finding the student’s counselor and his other teachers. Now teachers can develop common strategies to help kids.”

Furthermore, the ideas teachers receive can make the individual class run smoother and more efficiently.

One potential problem of CTC is that students do not know if whether they are in it or not. However, Drake said, “The real focus is on the teachers developing supports so its not that the kids will be clustered into the program. A student might be in the program for only a couple of classes.”

Because the program is different from middle school clusters, students do not need to know whether they are in it or not.

Also, at South, a program similar to CTC has been implemented for about eight years. CTC is a reliable, reputable program.
Although CTC is not perfect, it opens up teachers to new collaborative possibilities, while ensuring students get the support they need.