As a semi-sort-of retired teacher, I have three ways to keep my finger on the pulse of classroom practice: my work as a federal grant team member delivering multimodal learning activities to public school students and their teachers; observing and reflecting with teacher candidates in a university teaching preparation program; and listening to my eighth-grade grandniece at the dinner table.

All three sources talk about exhaustion and the anticipated relief of the school year ending. I’m ready to celebrate their victory — surviving a uniquely challenging back-to-in-person school year — and I’m wondering and worrying about what’s to come for them. The worry comes from a theme of frustration running through their teaching and learning stories: the theme of isolation for teachers, and the burdens that isolation passes on to their students.

I’m thinking about a beginning teacher, in her second-year assignment, teaching in an innovative, Hawaiian culture-based program that comprises one strand of a large elementary school. She’s struggled — and succeeded beautifully — in gifting her students with cultural learning activities while also teaching the standards-based grade level curriculum. The emotional support she received from her innovation program peers helped a lot. So did the instructional support she received from her district mentor. What she didn’t get was any collaborative support from her grade level colleagues — and that was sorely missed. She stayed focused and worked hard in her own silo.

I’m thinking about an outstanding student teacher at a large intermediate school. She’s worked hard as a Teacher Of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) to create engaging lessons for her students whose native languages are Chinese, Filipino, Marshallese and Ukrainian, and all of whom are also required to take the regular English/Language Arts (ELA) class for their grade level. Her lessons are carefully based on the required TESOL curriculum to prepare students to pass required proficiency tests. In our debrief session, she told me she has never met any of the ELA teachers and has never seen any ELA syllabus. She’s laser-focused and working hard in her own silo.

I’m thinking about the frequent complaints I hear from my grandniece, 14, about their homework burdens. They complain that each teacher seems to think their own subject is the only important one and assigns homework accordingly — all due at the same time and all for big points. “Why don’t they talk to each other?” they wonder. “Why don’t they coordinate assignments — have them overlap and count for two classes, or something?” They wonder how much more meaningful it would have been if their ELA teacher who assigned readings in a unit on the Holocaust, had coordinated with their history teacher who could have helped put the events in context. But siloed teaching is what students get.

I’m thinking back 50 years to when I was a raw beginner and the teacher next door locked her closet doors for fear that her siloed hoard of years of mimeographed worksheets might be stolen. Surely, we’re light years beyond that mentality, but I’m getting worried. I know what teachers and students need to truly thrive. They need integration, not isolation. Students need to experience their voyage through 12 years of public school as a seamless, supported, cycle of real learning. Teachers and students need to know themselves as members of a real community with mutual goals and needs and resources.

Learners, including teachers, need to make connections — with peers, with the learning content, with their own lives. As humans we grow and make meaning of our experiences together, not in silos. We need each other to learn — and to teach.

Elly Tepper, a consultant educator, is an Ulu A‘e Transitions Grant Team member.