I attended two different team meetings in the same day.  One was the team meeting that my apprenticeship teacher is a part of and then I went to the team meeting of the other eighth grade team. Both of the teams included the social studies, the English, and the math teachers. I am going to reflect on both of these team meetings because they were so different for having the same purpose.

          The first meeting was the team meeting that my teacher belongs to.  This team meets about once a week and just discussed the good students.  They also discussed what student should be the student of the week.  This was supposed to be a good student day but a teacher brought up another student they were worried about.  The two other teachers just said that the student was also failing their classes and wouldn’t be able to pass.  The teachers talked about what students were going to get the awards of the quarter.  One teacher started out by telling what student she thought should get the first award.  The other teachers both agreed that that student was performing well in both of their classes.  Lastly the teachers talked about awards for the semester and what they should give those students.  This meeting was about the good students and about picking a student that achieved good grades in this grading period.  The teachers used their grade books to figure out which student showed the best grades between the three classes.  This good student award was named during the meeting.  A discussion also went on about other types of awards could be handed out, although nothing was agreed upon at this time.

          The second meeting I attended was the meeting of the seventh and eighth grade team.  This team meets once a day unless one of the team members is gone for the day.  At the meeting I attended there was also a seventh grade counselor.  This team talked about which students the team was worried about.  One thing that was different about this meeting was that when a student was brought up all three of the teachers discussed what was happening in their classrooms with the student.  They also discussed what they had been doing in their classrooms that helped or hindered the student.  The counselor was there to say anything extra about the student that the team teachers may not have known.  This talk directed the teachers and the counselor into investigating this student even further, including setting up for the student to be tested for a learning disability.  The teachers used data about one particular student to figure out if the student needed something more then what the teachers could give.  With the information collected from all three of the teachers the counselor said that she would have enough information to look into talking to the student’s parents.

          The two meetings were supposed to be the same type of meeting but in actuality they were very different.  The second one would be the one that I would want to be a part of as a teacher for many reasons.  First of all the second team talked about everything that was happening in their classrooms, the good, the bad and what they were doing in their classrooms.  This is what all the research says a team meeting should be about in order for the meetings to be a successful part of the middle school curriculum.

          I have been going to Morgan Park since the end of September and have only seen my teacher’s team meet once, but the other team meets almost every day.  This was an interesting observation and you can guess how this affects the students. The teachers that met every day had built a relationship with each other that helped them relate and understand each other as well as how they taught and related students in the classroom.  This also helped because each one of the teachers had an opinion and expressed the opinions and the other teachers listened intently. 

          In the first meeting one of the teachers controlled the entire meeting and opinions or thoughts from the other teachers were mostly kept to themselves.  After spending many hours with my teacher I have come to know and respect her but I also know that this is not what she thinks the team meetings should be about. I know that she wants to have a deeper relationship with her team members so that she would feel freer to express her thoughts.