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I come from Greece. The twelve last years, I am School Counselor in primary schools in Athens

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I come from Greece. The twelve last years, I am School Counselor in primary schools in Athens

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My stydies
PhD
MSc in Social Neurosciences and Social Pedagogy in Education.

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Φωτογραφία Μπότου

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Something interesting!

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Emotional Inteligent
Do you believe that emotional intelligence relate to collaborative learning?

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My thoughts about Collaborative Learning

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My thoughts about Collaborative Learning

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What is collaborative learning?

Collaborative learning has replaced traditional teaching. Researches show that collaborative learning is more effective. Both teacher and students need to have appreciative skills. Students have to learn to collaborative with others. It seems very simple but is very difficult. They have to learn how to manage their relationships.  Respect, empathy, acceptance, solidary are essential competences for collaborative learning. Moreover, teachers have to motivate students to discover knowledge by changing ideas or to find problems solutions by helping each other.
In Greece primary school teachers’ don’t have interactive blackboards. They try to make their classes, more accommodative and attractive for students, with warm colors and colorful pictures. They create collaborative classes by moving desks. But despite the difficulties, they provide collaborative learning. The most of them separate students in groups during lessons.
I believe that collaborative learning enhance cohesion of class and improve relationships between students.  Usually, I divide my students in group and give to any group work to one of aspect on the learning object. In the end all the groups present their work in all students.  In the end all together discuss about the learning object, connecting the previous knowledge trying to understand the learning object in total. I believe that sometimes the new technology facilitates collaborative learning, but sometimes it doesn’t contributing anything either to students’ collaboration neither to students’ Knowledge. Many times, teachers' projects focus in new technology activities, but they don’t achieve the learning targets.
When class doesn’t have cohesion, class management during collaborative learning is problem. Firstly, teacher have to achieve cohesion between students, and then to implement collaborative learning. Team working evaluation is difficult, too. If you want to be right, you have to combine collaborative evaluation with personal tests. The assessment tools are very interesting.
Collaboration with my colleagues is very good. Sometimes I have faced difficulties. Many teachers don’t want to collaborate with others.  It seems, collaboration scare some teachers. Collaboration demands communications and negotiation skills. In students groups, some students have learning and social disabilities, so they isolate from the others. To avoid this, it is necessary, students responsibilities in working group to related with their skills
The collaborative learning demands collaborative skills from our pupils. Many times, teachers face difficulties to manage pupils’ work in groups effectually. They forget that first have to teach our pupils to negotiate, to manage conflicts, listening to the ideas of others, to agree all together what must be done, to take responsibilities etc. Technology supports collaborative learning, because organizes team work better and makes learning more attractive.
Professor Butler’s rubric helps to improve the quality of collaboration and to choose the most appropriative collaboration type. It is a very useful rubric. It is very important teacher to know the type and quality of collaboration taking place in the learning activities he designs. Only a qualitative work in group leads pupils in effective learning. Pupils, through collaboration, learn how to learn and to build good relationships with their peers.

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Generally, assessment encourages competition. Students are very competitive. Assessment of collaborative work reduces competition and develops skills and competences, as communicating techniques, negotiation, empathy, interdependent, solidary, respect for each other, to take responsibility, listening the others ideas, finding answers and solutions by collaboration, promoting students’ personal development and learning. My experience, my scientific Knowledge helps, that my assessment to be brief, clear and timely. Of course, I would like to have more tools, like rubric and checklists. In Greece, the most of the times, collaborative assessment doesn’t account at summative assessment.
Formative assessment helps to give feedback of collaborative learning, promoting learning procedure. Moreover, students’ self-assessment to how participate in team work helps them to improve their collaboration. Students understand better how to work with others to achieve their goals. Goals should be clear and evaluative. Students have to believe that through collaboration will achieve better results and to create new innovative thinks.
Sometimes, during collaborative learning process, problems present. Teachers have to design and organize all the details of collaborative teaching, e.g. classroom's space, materials, teaching goals, formative assessment etc. if they want to avoid a lot of problems. Collaborative teaching demands a very good preparing. An often problem is conflicts among students. So, in the beginning of school year, I work a lot to empower classroom’s coherence. This helps collaborative learning, enough. Moreover, I think that the school’s pedagogical clime plays an important role, too. A democratic and social school, which based on collaboration, promotes principles like to respect each other, empath and human rights.
I believe that self – and peer assessment helps students to be more independent learner and helps teacher to be more objective. Teachers should be problematizing if their assessment it is very different from students self-assessment.  Sometimes, I use peer assessment. I observed, in the beginning that, students assessed their peers work very severe, time by time, they became more objective and tried to help them.  Step by step students take over self – peer assessment’s responsibility.  So it is possible peer assessment reduces the trend of “friendship dependency”, “benefit of the dominators’ and “benefits of parasitism”, I will observe more carefully this in the future. Nowadays, it is obviously, that collaboration is a necessary competence for everybody, so have to account collaborative work in summative assessment.  Big achievements require collaborative work.

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When we collaborate with other teachers, we exchange ideas, experience, teaching techniques and strategies. Obviously, collaboration promotes better teaching practices, improving teaching skills by learning innovative pedagogical strategies. Greek Educational System provides opportunities for collaboration among teachers. Very often, teachers collaborate in mutual educational projects. Same age students groups work in specific themes projects, collectively. Moreover, teachers can to collaborate with other European teachers in e-Twinning projects or exchanging thoughts, ideas and good practice by skype, email or by participating in educational digital platforms.
Good relationships among leadership and staff are necessary. Leadership, based on democratic principles, promotes collaboration. In the other hand, some teachers are skeptical about collaboration because they believe that students learn better by individual teaching. I suggest teachers to watch students' face answering the question when are students more happy, when working individually or collaboratively?
Technology promotes a lot of communicative and collaborative tools with others teachers. Teachers not only sending and displaying their thoughts, good teaching practices and innovative collaborative teaching ideas, as well as, can use technology in processing, analyzing and sharing in any level of educational procedure. For example, teachers could to create an educational digital platform for their students, in which including individual and collaborative activities and exercises.  The most facilitative digital collaborative tool I think it is the using of “cloud”.
Teachers have hard-work program, daily.  So it’s difficult to find time for teacher collaboration. Teacher collaboration could be done by mail or skype when schoolwork will finish. Many times, teachers have feedback from other teachers’ through participation on digital platforms and webinars.  But the most important use of technology is to create educational tools, which promotes students collaborative learning and improve students' attaining. In this case, it is necessary teachers to collaborate with other experts.