Until entering this program through SJSU I have not had great success with collaborative learning assignments in my higher education. I felt like information was regularly jigsawed, but that as a student I was generally not responsible for learning the information other groups created. This program has given me a new perspective on collaborative learning. The difference is the way in which assignments have been designed. An assignment that requires students to critically confer with one another will help them to develop more complete ideas regarding the information they are learning. Students will be able to teach each other while learning themselves. The ideas presented in Understanding by Design seem relevant here (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). An assignment should be created to push students to deeper levels of understanding through the use of ongoing collaborative efforts.
One of the greatest benefits I have found through this blogging assignment was the motivation caused by the pressure of knowing that my peers would be commenting on my discussion. I found that I would think about each topic question a few different times through each cycle. I enjoyed reflecting on the ideas from a number of different perspectives and found myself looking forward to reading what each of you had written. Your comments have been insightful and I am genuinely grateful for the opportunity to have worked with you. This experience has helped me in the development of a new perspective regarding collaboration in education. While I may still drag my feet over the completion of an assignment, once it is finished, I find myself flipping back to the blog-- in anticipation of your responses.
That does not mean, however that a badly designed assignment will become any better just because students are working on it together. It just means that the students will get together and talk about how poorly designed the assignment was. Collaboration is an important aspect to learning, but in one sense collaboration is much like technology-- it is a tool that has become effective in learning, but simply using that tool does not necessitate that true understanding occurs.
Teachers rely heavily on collaborative efforts to best meet the educational needs of their students. At my schools this takes place in a number of ways. Most teachers share resources, ideas, lesson plans--as well as students since they are divided into ability groups for ELD time. They also meet weekly within grade levels to share ideas and discuss challenges and strategies to handle those. It seems as if teaching and collaboration are, at the elementary school level, intricately tied together. The challenge is learning to teach students to do the same.
Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J. (2006) Understanding by design. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, Inc.
If the student is a contentious contributor and learner, collaborative work does indeed motivate one to push to get an assignment done on time! I, too, found myself eagerly awaiting each group member’s responses to my blog posts and was gratified by each of your responses as it was clear that thought and effort were put into the exchange of ideas.
ReplyDeleteThis was one of the more successful collaborative experiences that I have had and although I do not generally consider myself a blogger or blog follower, it has made me curious about following professional blogs as an extension of learning.
I am seeing similar uses of teacher collaboration that you mentioned in the elementary school level in the middle schools. There are many combinations of team teaching for both ELD and Special Education support from lesson planning, to structuring small groups. I have noticed that teacher collaboration seems to have increased as educational philosophy has started to lean more and more towards an inclusion model. The number of people that a general education teacher collaborates with (think speech and language providers, counselors, occupational therapists, etc) has increased as the philosophy for teacher to student responsibility has changed as well. I know this is a little removed from the library world, but as an ex-special education teacher I also see collaboration from the “team-centered” aspect that is central to student success.
I hope that collaboration in teaching is on the rise! I think that building lesson plans together and bouncing ideas off of one another is crucial to professional development and to facilitating optimal learning environments for our students. Being able to parse what is working and what's not alongside a colleague who has a critical distance from the situation at hand is an invaluable source of support. Oftentimes, at least in my experience, a lot of meeting time between teachers is subsumed by behavior-oriented discussions (at least my grade level meetings were) rather than looking at curriculum design and lesson planning on the micro-level. This is unfortunate. But, given all of the tasks that fall upon teachers and the little time that they have to accomplish them all (more and more of the work done at home), collaboration on this level often gets short shrift (and can leave educators feeling overwhelmed and isolated ~ again, I am speaking from personal experience). But it sounds like you both are working in environments where a lot of this positive stuff is happening and being nurtured, so that is indeed something to look forward to!
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