Teachers at Northstar Elementary in Knoxville are leading the way with a new method of organizing communication between teachers, as they work to give their students the strongest possible curriculum.

The Building Leadership Team structure involves creating smaller teams of teachers based on grade level or specialty; representatives of each team take part in regular meetings, and then pass on what they’ve learned to their team members.

This saves teachers time by not requiring them to attend full faculty meetings, and allows them to better share what other instructors are doing and adapt successful practices to their own classrooms.

Teacher Jill Findley tells KNIA/KRLS News teachers and students benefit when instructors work as a team, rather than concentrating on just their own classes.

“When we operate as silos, we often sometimes forget about the bigger picture; and so when we work together we work on how we can all best improve practices we’ve learned from each other,” Findley says.

“We would learn what works in one classroom and we can modify it for our own classroom; so anytime we can collaborate and work together to build professional practices into increased student achievement, it’s a win-win for everybody.”

The goal is to expand the Building Leadership Team concept to all of Knoxville’s schools, in order to give teachers and students at all grade levels the benefit of this system.

For more information about Building Leadership teams, you can tune in to today’s edition of Let’s Talk Knoxville.