11. Teaming and Collaboration in Inclusive Settings

Teamwork and collaboration are essential practices in inclusive early childhood education because they help us provide comprehensive support, promote a positive environment, and ensure that each child and family gets what they need. Collaborative teams are also better able to meet the needs of children and families by bringing diverse viewpoints and experiences into the program. Most importantly, members of collaborative teams can easily communicate about everything that happens in their program, which might include the occasional hard conversation and potential disagreements about a child’s behavior, an activity, or a plan. Plus, our work in inclusive early childhood settings can be tough from time to time. Having a team to rely on makes things feel so much better.

But collaboration is an intentional practice that does not happen without planning. At the Herring Center, we believe that relationships are at the heart of everything we do and that collaboration is grounded in strong, trusting relationships. Of course, building relationships takes intentional time and effort. Teams can do this by doing some getting-to-know-you activities, intentionally checking in on how things are going outside of work, planning team-building activities, or even simply eating lunch together. We include some of these tools and ideas for this in our resources.

Teaming starts with relationships, but collaboration is much easier with specific tools. Let’s talk about those now. We’ll start with staff matrices. Jen, Luis, and Kristen are teachers for a before-and-after school care program and have 26 children who participate. To help organize their time and responsibilities, they create a staff matrix. A staff matrix outlines what needs to be done before, during, and after any program and who is responsible for completing each task. Using a staff matrix reduces confusion about where staff members need to go and what they need to do.

Here’s an example of their staff matrix. Notice the schedule is listed in a column down the left-hand side, with the teachers across the top row. For each time period of the program, the team has different responsibilities. During the before-school arrival, Jen checks in with each student, Luis preps the classroom areas and gets breakfast ready, and Kristen helps the kids put their backpacks away and wash their hands for breakfast. As the day goes on, the staff matrix outlines what everyone will do in each activity. An important part of creating this matrix was talking openly and honestly as a team about what each teacher likes and doesn’t like to do. For example, Luis is studying to be an elementary school teacher, so he wanted to lead the homework station every day. Jen loves greeting students at the very start of the day, while Kristen finds this time period chaotic and difficult to manage. With this staff matrix in place, it’s clear what each teacher is supposed to be doing during both the before and after-school programs. Having clear roles makes all of us feel better about our work and helps teams work more efficiently.

This tool can be used outside of a school setting too. Here is an example of how the Sunday school teachers at Isabella’s church used a staff matrix to organize the teachers and volunteers. We see the schedule down the left column and the adults across the top. Just like with the previous classroom team example, the Sunday school teachers create a plan for how they’ll support children during each activity and what each adult’s role is across the morning. Finally, here is a matrix for a gymnastics class with two coaches. While the setting is quite different, using a staff matrix makes it much easier for all the gymnastics coaches to work together and feel organized in a very lively space.

With staff matrices, we always have the schedule down the left side and the teachers across the top. While the schedule and time will vary, this is a useful tool for supporting collaboration in any setting.

Another teaming strategy that helps us work efficiently is called zoning. Zoning involves dividing a larger space into smaller areas or zones and assigning adults to those specific zones. Let’s look at how the teachers at one outdoor summer day camp use zoning to organize their space. Discovery Summer Camp is a day program for children in first to fifth grade that meets at a large park with wooded areas, a playground, many trails, and beach access. In this large open space, the team has to be very attentive to where every child is every minute of the day. Zoe, Willow, and Daniela, the teachers, have created a zoning chart to divide up the space. Zone one is the play structure, zone two is the picnic tables where children can do art projects, and zone three is the parking lot where a teacher gets children from caregivers and directs them to get started playing on the playground or doing an art project at the picnic tables. With these zones, each teacher has an area of the park where they supervise and support the group or connect with families as they drop off children. The class then has news for the day and snack time and either goes on a hike or spends time at the beach. When at the beach, the teachers use another zoning chart to organize the space. Zone one is the large log in the tide pond, zone two is the section between the tide pond and the fallen log, and zone three is the area north of the fallen log. In a busy outdoor setting, zoning charts really help teachers be organized around how they’re supervising and supporting all children. Zoning is a great way to organize staff to help keep children safe, which is especially important in an outdoor summer day camp. But zoning can be used in many other settings too. To create a zoning chart in your setting, consider the space and where the children play. Divide the area into sections for each adult and talk as a team about who would like to be in a certain section. Some teams change zones every week; others change every day. It’s completely up to what works best for the team. In some cases, we have to rework our zones. For example, at Discovery Park Camp, after the first week, the team noticed that far more children played on the playground than with the art project at the picnic tables. So, they switched zones and divided up the playground into two zones where there were two teachers to supervise the group. Zone two included the picnic tables, but usually, there were just a few kids in this area.

The most effective collaboration practices are the ones that help teams work together. While the specific staff matrix and zoning charts will look different depending on the setting, the schedule, and the type of activities children do, the basic premise is the same: they give us tools to work together. But, of course, this all starts with the people on a team having trusting, supportive, and safe relationships with each other. How might staff matrices and zoning work in your program?