from VCCA Journal, Volume 9, Number 1, Fall/Winter 1994, 39-41
© Copyright 1994 VCCA Journal
The heart of professional renewal is the individual's own self- generated, self-drawn map for a previously-uncharted journey: the Individual Development Plan. Not that we've traveled heretofore without direction or self-awareness. We're educated and trained to know where we're going professionally and how we'll get there. We do our best to keep up with our fields. We do what we can to make our experience count. Often, however, we walk with a certain randomness, and we travel pretty much alone. The Individual Development Plan offers a means of traveling straightaway--or (for us humanities types) of wandering more deliberately. As we prepare to embark, does it not make sense to join with a traveling companion, a colleague who helps us draw and take guidance from our own individual map?
Could it not be delightful and instructive to travel with a professional partner whose commitment nearly guarantees improvement in our work and therefore in our wellbeing? I don't know about you, but I've spent many years acting doggedly independent and self-reliant in my scholarship, writing, and teaching. I've generally pursued my own path, enjoyably, productively, if one-mindedly. Oh, I've cultivated good professional relationships with students and colleagues, not to mention some very nice friendships. I've certainly spent countless hours, many of them enlightening and rewarding, discussing subject matter and pedagogy. I'm thinking about something more focused, more involving, more formal, more productive. The sole purpose would be working together for development and renewal.
The benefits of professional partnership, as in team teaching, are well known but not widely experienced because of constraints of time, money, policy, habit. I consider myself fortunate. For nine summers I had the pleasure of team teaching an intensive graduate course in writing and the teaching of writing, with one of the finest teachers I have ever known. Ongoing interaction with her generated some of my most enjoyable and memorable lessons as a writer and teacher. Though the course was exhausting for us and the students, it renewed and enlightened me beyond any other teaching or learning experience I can name. Each fall I'd return to PVCC inspired for another year.
Good teaching in just about any setting, certainly in the comprehensive community college, requires much more than mastery of subject matter and a reasonably appropriate pedagogy. It requires an interpersonal touch which is hard to generalize about because successful interaction with students depends on so many variables. It's not a matter of learning to interact in a certain way but of learning to interact in a way which is effective for our own unique personalities. As my teaching partner and I worked together, we discussed not only subject matter and pedagogy, but also interpersonal issues which affected our working relationship and our interaction with students. When I would come across with a know-it-all or controlling attitude, or when I would talk too much in class, Carol would describe my behavior and discuss it with me frankly and diplomatically. I learned to be more aware of how my shortcomings can impede my work and to intervene with myself in the interest of better interaction.
As well, that partnership taught me more about my discipline and pedagogy than any other professional experience I can recall, including countless years of graduate school at a very respectable university. I would be working on a particular issue, discuss it with Carol, and suddenly realize a breakthrough because she understood my concern yet approached it with a different set of eyes. Often a gap in my understanding would be one of her areas of strength. Likewise, I would complement her knowledge and understanding.
Can we not replicate such benefits even in our busy lives at community colleges? Team teaching is a possibility for some of us, of course, but our system is not set up to support it financially for more than a few faculty each term. Faculty who do team teach often do so on top of a full load. Professional partnership of the sort I have in mind could be arranged on our own schedules--by faculty, administrators, or staff--with as many or as few meetings as we could manage. We could develop our Individual Development Plans in tandem and each isolate a small number of individual goals to work on in a particular term or year. We could fashion a mutual plan for ongoing discussion, support, and assessment. Teaching faculty could include, if they wished, sitting in on each other's classes periodically as observers or even participants.
Partners might come from the same job type--or not. Currently, I'm inclined toward someone in another subject area who probably doesn't share my "givens." It need only be a colleague willing to make a journey with me, offering camaraderie and honest talk about scholarship, literature, writing, teaching. The fare seems cheap, the scenery and company fresh and renewing.
Dick Harrington, who teaches English at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, served as the first President of the Virginia Community Colleges Association.