EAST FLATBUSH — As science teacher Deborah Schaeffer led a lesson on climate change on a recent Thursday afternoon, not only were her students at East Brooklyn Community High School paying close attention but so were a team of other educators in the room.
Schaeffer is a model teacher. Literally.
As part of the city's Learning Partners program, Schaeffer opens her room to educators from other schools, which is why her climate lesson included observers from her own school along with people from Williamsburg's Green School, Carnarsie's Brooklyn Bridge Academy and Brownsville's Brooklyn Democracy Academy.
"It's all about improving the learning process for teachers," Schaeffer said during the two hour debriefing session after the lesson. "It's teachers as learners."
As the head of the science department at the seven year old East Flatbush transfer school that serves 185 students, who are older than typical but far behind in credits, Schaeffer's classroom is used as a laboratory and resource to support educators on how to develop effective teaching strategies.
The Learning Partners program is all about collaboration between schools. It's a ground-up approach to reform rather than a top-down method and it's one of Chancellor Carmen Fariña's pet initiatives.
Fariña, who has decades of experience in the classroom as a teacher and principal, has talked extensively about how city schools are doing great things and should be sharing their practices to help other schools improve student performance, one school at a time.
She began piloting the program as soon as she took the helm of the system, starting with 21 schools in the spring of 2014.
The program has since grown to 146 schools, reaching 82,000 students or 8 percent of the city's students.
Between three and eight schools are grouped together, each with a different focus depending on their strengths and interests. One group, for instance, is working on implementing a school-wide mentoring program to provide social-emotional learning support to at-risk students. Another is working on how to support English Language Learners through interdisciplinary and cohesive vocabulary instruction.
Those partnered with East Brooklyn Community are concentrating on a particular educational approach that's popular in Japan called "lesson study," in which teachers work together to create lesson plans.
Many education experts believe the approach can help new and struggling teachers develop strong lesson plans since they're collaborating closely with and continually supported by other teachers.
When East Brooklyn's principal Patrick McGillicuddy selected his four partner schools, he was looking for education leaders who "were going to be real" and were on a similar path.
The Green School's principal Cara Tait-Fanor said that being part of the group was challenging and engaged her in new ways.
"This keeps me focused and grounded and it's the hardest work I've ever done," said Tait-Fanor, who started as a teacher at her school 10 years ago and took over as principal five years ago.
Of last year's Learning Partner schools, 90 percent believed they made positive changes based on what they learned from their partners, according to a DOE survey.
Widening the networks of colleagues in other schools is helpful in changing the culture of schools and how educators approach their work, believes Phil Weinberg, Deputy Chancellor for Teaching and Learning.
"We're trying to create within the school system an ethic of learning with each other and sharing with others. We want schools to learn from and with each other," Weinberg said.
"There are 1,700 schools. The things that are working well [in one] can touch other schools. People look at the New York City public school system and say, 'It must so hard to improve something so large.' This is our opportunity to use our size to our advantage."
