the attitude of professional privacy is not conducive to professional development
Build relationships
Observe the best
Ask questions
Share
Come prepared
preparation sparks much deeper conversation, more complete answers and better solutions. For informal collaborations, before I attempted to try out any new idea, I would ask one of my esteemed colleagues what they thought of it. In terms of assessments, the easiest way to improve the validity of the assessment is to have a colleague or group of colleagues review it.
develop a list of "how to" and "why for" questions regarding student data, instruction, discipline, etc.
bring my list of questions pertinent to the agenda in order to pick the groups' collective brain for answers.
one of the reasons that schools do not improve as fast as we would like them to is that when teachers get together for a purpose, rarely has research been done by the teachers, neither have ideas been mapped out prior to the meeting.
teachers, when it comes to their performance in the classroom, tend to stick to themselves.