I had been teaching a first/second grade combination at Escondido Elementary school on the Stanford campus (serving mainly children of graduate students from around the world attending Stanford University) when I got the opportunity to team teach with Keith Libert, a teacher who came to the Palo Alto Unified School District the same year I did. I jumped at the chance. We would each be teaching a third/fourth combination class, and our principal knew that we wanted to work closely together.

Keith and I planned over the summer and decided that we would take turns writing the classroom newsletter and planning the homework for both classes. We would go on field trips together and share the responsibility of teaching subjects like P.E. and music. Little did we know how successful we would be and how rewarding the experience would be for us and for our students!

We started off the year by having our classes meet together and presenting ourselves as a united front. We shared our common goals for the classes and explained that we would be doing a lot of things together. Then, we met with the parents at Back to School Night to do the same thing. The parents realized then and there that we two teachers were partners and that we were both teaching the same curriculum. While teaching styles and personalities would differ from class to class, we would essentially mirror each other. We eliminated a lot of the problems that normally when parents compare classes by presenting our united front that way. Throughout the year, if we encountered a parent problem regarding our curriculum, we would more often than not show up together at the conference to discuss the issue, whether the parent came from Keith's class or mine.

Our principal encouraged our partnership and helped to arrange common prep time. This, more than anything, facilitated our partnership. Every Wednesday, while both of our classes were taking music, we would plan our week together. We would discuss the items to be included in the class newsletter, plan out the homework that would complement the week's activities, and then plan our curriculum for the week.

We found our partnership to be a rewarding and fun experience and we found that our students viewed us as a team. Our partnership served as a strong model of how people can work together in a cooperative manner.

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