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I consider myself a good team player, but do I always act like that? Right now I am questioning an attitude of mine: when I have to plan something jointly, I always tend to have a "rigid" idea about how something should work. That may be articulate and well grounded, but not open enough to welcome others' point of view. How often do I feel that the product of my collaboration with others is more valuable than a similar resource that I could have done myself? This may also mean that collaboration is not always the best thing to do: while peer feedback and discussion on general strategies are surely a great opportunity, day-to-day learning activities may be better designed by the individual that knows the class - and their own strengths and weaknesses as a practicioner... But it could also mean that I need to work on my own attitude to be able to collaborate more effectively.

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Among many obstacles to teachers collaborating there is the "individual results" culture. If a school (or a school system) goes too far in assessing the individual teacher on the basis of their results in tests etc., it creates an incentive to competition and isolation. Everyone will want to be seen "better" than their colleagues, so they may not be very inclined to share materials, resources etc.

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It is obvious but difficult to put in practice the shift from grading the task to grading the outcome, the actual learning. I think about my students, particular those with special educational needs: how can they demonstrate the skills they are developing and how can I focus on assessing them. And, how can alternative assessment structures (e.g. in groups or through different task) guarantee rigor and comparability of results?

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I like what Antonio from Portugal shared for two reasons:
- He uses check-lists or rubrics to focus on the skills that he wants the students to develop, so evidences for these skills can be looked for
- He designs assessment methods and criteria with the learners. This is something I may consider in the future, even beyond collaborative tasks and strategies.

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This course is challenging me to reconsider my use of groups and pairs. While I use collaboration on a number of cases, I am now starting to think how it can become more embedded in my day-to-day practice. Particularly, I would like it to be part of my routines, rather than something that I do every now and again. Since I am starting a new learning unit with all my class, I will try to twist my mid-term planning in a more "collaborative" direction and see what happens.

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My activity of teaching while "drawing in the air" and inviting them to do the same and to visualize what we were drawing is a level 1: there is no grouping or pairing of the students.
The "jigsaw" activity where students need to research a detail of the topic and then teach each other is a level 3 because there is shared responsibility but no substantive decisions are made. The "level of collaboration" may be raised by giving them some control over the way that the aspects are assigned to each of them, or over the resources used. There is, however, a high degree of interdependence in this activity, which makes me wonder why the hierarchy of the rubric has been designed this way. Is there any reason why the sharing of decisions comes before the interdependence?

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Criteria from prof. Butler to judge the quality of collaboration

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Criteria from prof. Butler to judge the quality of collaboration

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- Are they working together?
- Do they have shared responsibility?
- Do they make substantive decision?
- Is their work interdependent?
It tends to happen when they discuss an issue OR they solve a problem OR they make a product. Collaboration may also involve people OUTSIDE the classroom (other students, experts, community members etc.)

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The Irish education agenda sounds quite similar to what the British agenda was when I trained as a teacher in York (UK). Two questions stem from that experience. First: how can this agenda effectively integrate with academic subject learning? In the UK, these things seem to fall out of fashion because of a increased focus on academic results. This can be questionable (and I do question it) as a sole method to measure educational outcomes. However is there a way to look after BOTH development of key skills AND academic achievement without one paying the price for the other? Second question: is it possible to work long term on these aspects without being hostage of politics and educational "fashion"? As much as I believe in these skills, I see many teachers getting frustrated by the continuous change of focus.

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This is the work of a small group of students on protein synthesis. After personal research, a video and some traditional teaching, students had to produce a model with simple materials and then use it to illustrate the process to the others.

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Learning activity 1 - Low level of collaboration activity

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Learning activity 1 - Low level of collaboration activity

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I taught a topic while "writing in the air" a diagrams and pictures of what I was doing and asking my students to do the same while listening. Then I encouraged them to draw by memory the diagrams. Results were encouraging, in terms of quality of the work. While students needed to collaborate with me, they did not needed to collaborate with others.

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Learning activity 1 -High level of collaboration activity

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Learning activity 1 -High level of collaboration activity

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I recently used an activity normally known as "jigsaw". In this activity, students are in groups of four and each of them needs to become "expert" of a topic and to teach it to the other members of the small group. It worked well: there was a good vibe and involvement and my follow-up questioning evidenced that most students had learnt the main points. I did not plan (as in the original version of the activity) time in the classroom for students to collaborate with others that had studied the same topic. It may be interesting to do so next time. Students needed to collaborate in this activity as they where responsible for each other's learning.

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How to guarantee the quality of the collaboration?

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How to guarantee the quality of the collaboration?

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This question seems crucial, since we want them to learn how to collaborate. The teacher from Modena alternates heterogeneous and homogeneous groups to get the best of both. To me, it is also about students developing an ethos of collaboration.

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Giving control and responsibility to students is risky, in a system where there is little room (and little forgiveness) for mistakes...
Risk number 1: students just get "wild", loud, randomly social and this affect their learning negatively
Risk number 2: students work less than they should and make less progress than expected, given the limited amount of learning time. How do I prevent these things from happening?

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The 3.0 learning environment looks just amazing - though transitions between one "mode" and the other may be difficult. How do I live without this type of environment? Maybe movement of students can make up for movement of furniture. Turning, standing, moving to a different part of the classroom. However, I may even try to do a "temporary" café style arrangement just by pairing up two tables for part of the lesson.

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First thing learned: there is a difference between collaborative and co-operative learning... All of us teacher LOVE labels and buzz words! It actually sounds interesting: it sounds like in collaborative learning the small group itself controls how to work towards the goal.