Making the Case for Partnerships

Co-teaching, Co-leading, Co-creating

The Brief Case 📚→💼→📈→📊

Often, the degree to which we are able to connect with others — to learn about teaching and learning practices in other contexts, to collaborate on specific work, or to share our practices or research findings — determines the extent to which our projects reach their desired outcomes.

“Partnership as Relationship” by Eric Roland

Co-teaching, co-leading, co-creating — we believe that our best work has come from our partnership.

We attribute the success of this partnership to the fact that the work we do together is intended to help others. In an authentic way, it makes sense that such work would emanate from helping each other, from committing to the work of partnership in partnership. As educators, these prepositions matter to us.

And they matter for schools, too. Partnerships, and how they are structured, can lead to deep learning opportunities, extend programs, and/or expand the educational sites upon which school mission and vision are enacted.

Some employees derive personal fulfillment from building with, being around, and serving others. Partnership, both within their school and outside their school, is an easy sell for them. In fact, they probably show up for projects with partners in mind if not in tow. For others, often of a more individualistic bent, partnership is less intuitive and certainly not a default setting. For them, partnership has to be engineered or insisted upon until it becomes a habit. (We have found that it helps to encourage these folks to trade the ‘hard work’ of going it alone with the ‘hard work’ of developing partnerships.)

Regardless of an employee’s orientation toward partnership, a simple framework can help to support engagement. Partnership built first on consistency, then on