The Buy-In

I attended a roundtable discussion about documentation and Reggio inspired work where I got into a heated debate with one of the facilitators about the responsibility of educators to make their teaching visible. There was a panel of four educators; each one presented a documentation piece from their classroom or playgroup. After each presentation there was a question and answer period. One of the panelists presented an inspiring documentation about a bird project that lasted for months. What struck me most by her discourse was the fact that she had another teacher in her classroom who struggled against project-based curriculum and who kept doing her "canned curriculum" she had been doing for years. I raised my hand and innocently asked, "What action did you take to help your other teacher understand what you were doing?" The panelist replied that she hadn't really worked on that piece, and maybe she should have. Now this is a very important component of my teaching; I'm constantly trying to figure out how to transmit information to parents, teachers and children. Since this roundtable was, in essence, about this topic, I asked, "What would you have done to get the teacher to buy in to your philosophy?" Suddenly, another panelist become visibly upset and announced that the teacher had no responsibility to solicit the other teacher's buy-in. I respectfully disagreed, "I understand that we are all on a journey, and that everyone is at a different place with how they teach, but I strongly feel that it is our duty to inform the field about why we do what we do. If our teams don't understand or support each other, then that's a problem." Her pretext that, "teachers doing this work didn't have time to mentor other teachers," wasn't good enough for me. Here she was talking about the significance of documenting, which is a vehicle we use to convey what we do and why we do it, yet she couldn’t see how her words contradicted the basis of her seminar.