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4.7 Irish teachers’ reflections on teacher collaboration

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4.7 Irish teachers’ reflections on teacher collaboration

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Yes we  agree that finding time within the school day for teacher collaboration is challenging. But we also agree that after seeing the benefits of that kind of work it can be easier to find it.

With a restricted number of colleagues our  experiences of this are positive, sometimes we meet in person, sometimes we meet on line, those are our solutions to overcome this challenge.

Teachers feel overwhelmed with workpaper, bureaucracy  and meetings that are not well conducted and most of the subjects are not helpful to students progress.That an issue to move beyond.   But we agree that working with teachers from different disciplines can be very useful, and in the past we had good experiences of this? One of  conditions needed  for this to work is an open mind.

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4.6 How technology can facilitate teacher collaboration

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4.6 How technology can facilitate teacher collaboration

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Yes, we use technology specifically for the purpose of collaborating with other teachers ( google drive, e-mail, facebook, Padlet and even   Adobe connect . At the present one of us is participating in  a Webinar course with Zoom launch.  Most of  of our digital collaboration with teachers is equivalent to ‘sending and displaying’, as mentioned in the video, but also  processing, analyzing and sharing (eTwinning projects, Moocs, webinar course)

We recommend digital tools like google drive, we use it with our department and even with our students. We also use Moodle platform with students with some interesting participation.

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4.5 Skills and conditions needed for teacher collaboration

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4.5 Skills and conditions needed for teacher collaboration

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A lot of  skills and conditions are necessary for teacher collaboration to flourish in schools.  We can add, based on our experience,  that we need a open mind and receptivity.  The leadership in our current school encourages  model collaboration, but there are very sceptical teachers and we fight every day to show them the advantages of collaborative work. Individualism  is very present and people don’t find time to engage themselves on team work.

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4.4 The benefits and challenges of teacher collaboration

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4.4 The benefits and challenges of teacher collaboration

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Yes, of course we agree with the benefits and challenges highlighted by Professor Butler. Based on our experiences we can see that the challenges are big. One enormous is finding time, as Professor Butler says. In fact schools, by tradition,  don't provide time to that kind of work, most of  teachers are not used to work with others teachers. These situation is changing and now we can hear the word collaboration  all the time. Our headmaster, and some of us, are trying to apply the collaboration model and convince teachers of the benefits of collaboration between them and, as teachers are models to the students, they also are learning  to adapt that methodology. However we collaborate both in and outside of school. We  collaborate eventually with teachers in our own subject group having meets every fortnight to prepare classes and design assessment.

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4.3 A secondary teacher’s experience of teacher collaboration

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4.3 A secondary teacher’s experience of teacher collaboration

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We think about the various assessment methods used by Chrysa to assess her pupils’ collaborative learning were very helpful and she had to work a lot to planificate those tools. We agree that  the questions she asked her pupils were helpful in getting them to reflect about their collaborative skills Implementing peer assessment with pupils of a young age (6-11 year olds) is possible but must be prepared. there are special considerations to be taken into account like children emotions and sensibility. Her final question to reflect on is indeed a challenge and we must learn a lot to do it well.

We attach a rubric that we constructed last year to assess   a workgroup. It has been our first experience and it written on Portuguese. We provide also the  link to Rubistar.

Indeed peer assessment can help students to move away from seeing teachers as the only source of judgement about the quality of their learning, thereby helping them to become more independent learners.

Research shows that self-assessment combined with peer assessment reduces the trend for ‘friendship dependency’, ‘benefit of the dominators’ and ‘benefit of parasitism’ and that this match with our experiences.

Assigning a percentage weight to individual assessment as part of the summative assessment related to collaborative work seems important and maybe we adapt that suggestion.

The ‘co-teaching rotation’ collaboration model mentioned by Valentina seems very interesting but we have no experience in that type of collaboration.  Teachers  bringing their best skills and practices to the team while remaining flexible to adapt them in case others suggest better ways of working seems amazing and we can see that situation several times  ( for example i’m not very good on manual work but my colleague is...so he can help me on a certain task...and vice -versa)

Acting upon the constructive criticisms of other teachers it’s not easy and sometimes they misunderstood our intentions.  We  need to be very diplomatic and avoid to hurt our colleague feelings, but we must exchange thoughts, experiences and be open minded , Our students can benefit a lot!

We hadn't heard of all the platforms and digital tools mentioned by Reyhan in the video. But we know very well eTwinning. Both of us are eTwinnwers, although not with the same level of experience.

We agree that not all teachers have the required skills to take advantage of digital technologies. Many times our peers have afraid of technologies and they refuse ( as if that could be possible nowadays...)  Reyhan mentions social media networks, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, as particularly useful spaces for teacher collaboration and professional learning and we have  some experience with those social media networks for teacher collaboration and professional learning.  We agree   with Reyhan that is difficult to choose the better tools  between digital technologies that can help teachers collaborate more efficiently because they are so many… and so attractive!

Yes, of course we agree with the benefits and challenges highlighted by Professor Butler. Based on our experiences we can see that the challenges are big. One enormous is finding time, as Professor Butler says. In fact schools, by tradition,  don't provide time to that kind of work, most of  teachers are not used to work with others teachers. These situation is changing and now we can hear the word collaboration  all the time. Our headmaster, and some of us, are trying to apply the collaboration model and convince teachers of the benefits of collaboration between them and, as teachers are models to the students, they also are learning  to adapt that methodology. However we collaborate both in and outside of school. We  collaborate eventually with teachers in our own subject group having meets every fortnight to prepare classes and design assessment.

A lot of  skills and conditions are necessary for teacher collaboration to flourish in schools.  We can add, based on our experience,  that we need a open mind and receptivity.  The leadership in our current school encourages  model collaboration, but there are very sceptical teachers and we fight every day to show them the advantages of collaborative work. Individualism  is very present and people don’t find time to engage themselves on team work.

technology specifically for the purpose of collaborating with other teachers ( google drive, e-mail, facebook, Padlet and even   Adobe connect . At the present one of us is participating in  a Webinar course with Zoom launch.  Most of  of our digital collaboration with teachers is equivalent to ‘sending and displaying’, as mentioned in the video, but also  processing, analyzing and sharing (eTwinning projects, Moocs, webinar course)

We recommend digital tools like google drive, we use it with our department and even with our students. We also use Moodle platform with students with some interesting participation.

Yes we  agree that finding time within the school day for teacher collaboration is challenging. But we also agree that after seeing the benefits of that kind of work it can be easier to find it.

With a restricted number of colleagues our  experiences of this are positive, sometimes we meet in person, sometimes we meet on line, those are our solutions to overcome this challenge.

Teachers feel overwhelmed with workpaper, bureaucracy  and meetings that are not well conducted and most of the subjects are not helpful to students progress.That an issue to move beyond.   But we agree that working with teachers from different disciplines can be very useful, and in the past we had good experiences of this? One of  conditions needed  for this to work is an open mind.

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4.2 A primary school teacher’s experience of teacher collaboration

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4.2 A primary school teacher’s experience of teacher collaboration

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The ‘co-teaching rotation’ collaboration model mentioned by Valentina seems very interesting but we have no experience in that type of collaboration.  Teachers  bringing their best skills and practices to the team while remaining flexible to adapt them in case others suggest better ways of working seems amazing and we can see that situation several times  ( for example i’m not very good on manual work but my colleague is...so he can help me on a certain task...and vice -versa)

Acting upon the constructive criticisms of other teachers it’s not easy and sometimes they misunderstood our intentions.  We  need to be very diplomatic and avoid to hurt our colleague feelings, but we must exchange thoughts, experiences and be open minded , Our students can benefit a lot!

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3.8 Answers to teachers’ questions on assessing collaborative learning

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3.8 Answers to teachers’ questions on assessing collaborative learning

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Indeed peer assessment can help students to move away from seeing teachers as the only source of judgement about the quality of their learning, thereby helping them to become more independent learners.

Research shows that self-assessment combined with peer assessment reduces the trend for ‘friendship dependency’, ‘benefit of the dominators’ and ‘benefit of parasitism’ and that this match with our experiences.

Assigning a percentage weight to individual assessment as part of the summative assessment related to collaborative work seems important and maybe we adapt that suggestion.

What we like most   is the idea of involving students in the definition of the parameters to be considered in the assessmen

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3.7 Collaborative learning - What to assess and how?

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3.7 Collaborative learning - What to assess and how?

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Once more fantastic help provided by this video based on Luis Valente work.

Yes we did already use rubrics to assess  teamwork because  last year on a PDW eTwinning one of us take contact with rubistar that allows us to create  Rubrics for your Project-Based Learning Activities.

We constructed our own rubrics and we see that, after the first moments because we have no experience, all gets easier. All the tips that are given can be very useful to teachers work.

We attach a rubric that we constructed last year to assess   a workgroup. It has been our first experience and it written on Portuguese. We provide also the  link to Rubistar.

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3.6 Collaborative learning and student peer reviews

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3.6 Collaborative learning and student peer reviews

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Inspiring. We loved Anna presentation and she gives us great  tips and puts interesting questions. When our students are working in a project  we,  like Anna, often leave our  students free to decide who they would like to work with and each team member’s role.

Assess the work is difficult as we already mentioned, but  Anna mentions to a large variety of digital tools which are helpful in implementing and assessing collaborative work, such as Edmodo, Scrumy, Tackks, Padlets, Google Forms etc. our experiences of these tools is limited, but we use sometimes Google forms and Padlets, also Kahoot. The other ones we are going to explore them as soon as possible.

We think that the last questions that Anna has posted are fundamental . Teachers and students are used to assess  learning and not to assess for learning.

And the last question is so big...some time ago one of our students told us that school kills curiosity and creativity. That idea bring to us so many doubts…

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3.5 An ICT teacher’s experience of assessing students’ collaborative learning

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3.5 An ICT teacher’s experience of assessing students’ collaborative learning

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It's a great job and Antonio did  interesting projects involving students in the tasks and also in their assessment. Students should appreciate a lot the work that they did. But we can anticipate some issues concerning time. Planification and implementation of these kind of work  takes time...lots of time. Most of the teachers aren't able to spend so much time, but, if we practise, we spend less time on planification and all becomes more easy.Tips that Antonio gives are good tips, we  reorganize classroom space almost everyclasses and, children help on that task. It's nice to see them arriving class and starting to change the  place of chairs and tables...if they are used they do it  with good will.

We  try also to introduce digital tools and we believe in sharing material. But we need also to increase  teachers digital skills. That’s why courses like this one are very useful.

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3.4 A sports teacher's experience of assessing students’ collaborative learning

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3.4 A sports teacher's experience of assessing students’ collaborative learning

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We think about the various assessment methods used by Chrysa to assess her pupils’ collaborative learning were very helpful and she had to work a lot to planificate those tools. We agree that  the questions she asked her pupils were helpful in getting them to reflect about their collaborative skills Implementing peer assessment with pupils of a young age (6-11 year olds) is possible but must be prepared. there are special considerations to be taken into account like children emotions and sensibility. Her final question to reflect on is indeed a challenge and we must learn a lot to do it well.

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After the video and a glance of  resource section, we discuss between us the type of assessment we do of our students. The questions that are putted are crucial and the information very useful. We agree that assessment help students to take responsibility of their own learning and may  promote collective conscience of the benefits of helping each other. Competition is not always negative and can motivate students if is positive.

We appreciate the distinction between types of assessment and the value that is given to feedback. In fact is very important that a  diplomatic,  brief  , clear and timely feedback  can be given to the students.

The rubrics are fantastic tools and the idea of involve students in its construction is very good. To finish this post we want to tell that checklists, simple, short and easy to use can also help teacher work and learning activities.

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Low level of collaboration
Peer work around a worsheet

Code 1
High level of collaboration
Preparation of a debate on ethical consumer to provide the tools and resources we need to make choices simple, informed and effective (role play)

Code 3 �������

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I carried out sometimes similar exercises to the ‘circle time’ described in the video,  We  discussed  how the group work went, what were the positive and negative aspects and what could be solutions for the future.

As result of that debate most of the times it had improved  students’ collaboration skills and when we work again in group we can see improvements. However not all is good. Some students don’t engage themselves and they desagree in some issues…and the improvements can’t bee seen. It takes time and lots of patience.

Technology is useful in class especially when collaborative practices are bu tis not enought, we must add pedagogical knowledge and flexible classrooms 412m�a�}

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Foreign language teacher’s experience of collaborative learning

In my  experience of collaborative learning, behavior management and getting students to stay on track is some times a  challenge. Not all the classes have a excelent behavior and then teacher, as the adult in the relationship must motivate students and show them that it can be very pleasant work with colleagues because a big number of competences can be improved..

In fact we agree  that assessing collaborative learning is particularly difficult, and  experiences of this is not always very positive. Since we learned to use rubrics  of evaluations (we also use Rubistar, because one of us has been in a PDW eTwinning were she knew the tool) is more easy to evalluate teamwork.   Do the  monitoring of  teamwork is also a challenge and we eventually use the ways mentioned in the video (e.g. through self and peer assessment) useful. WE know by name a big number of  online tools mentioned, and we use sometimes titanpad, Google docs, padlet, kahoot, etc

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We  must say that those steps are so clarly explained that they seem easy to give… but in fact they require lots of preparation work.  We think that the example scenarios are an amaizing work, but no so easy to them ourselves

In a certain way they remembered us of Diney stategy, that  way of organising our thinking to be better able to achieve goals or dreams.

Dream,explore, map, make, ask, remake and show  can be done by the dreamer, critic and realist.

We are  still thinking how to use/ adapt  the templates  to our context

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21 CLD Collaboration Rubric

How useful do you find? Do you think it? Have you used this or similar rubrics before to help you design collaborative learning activities? What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of it?

Traditional school does not prepare students to workteam. Students, as  well their teachers are used to individual work and individual assessement but school nowadays must develop team skills as we already had seen.  The rubric Professor Deirdre Butler explained can be most useful in helping us to understand the type and quality of collaboration taking place in the learning activities we design. We can understand if students  are only working together or if they are collaborating. Reading further information that is present on resource section has been also very useful

Example of a substantive decision

Students in teams are preparing for a debate and must decide what side of the issue they will argue for. This is a content decision that will shape their work together, and students must negotiate their ideas

Example of a non substantive decision

Student teams assign roles to team members based on the list of roles the educator has defined. The educator has planned the process of their work, not the students.

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Embedding collaborative learning into lesson design

I loved the vídeo and the message that it contains. In fact we must all agree in the concepts that we use. Define concepts is very important, so that we all speak the same language.

The enumeration of skills seemed fundamental, and the collaboration skills are all determinants to the student’s sucess in the defiant world we live in.

I agre with Professor Deirdre Butler when she alerts to the fact that all techology is used for a purpose, not for it self. We use tec to achieve a goal, and i can’t agree more when she says that those skills are not innate, they must be developped with learning activities designed with that purpose.

In despite of that beliefs my experiences are still   insuficient and not all well succeded. I’m learning also, and step by step improving my own skills with some experineces like the present course.

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The 4 Collaboration Questions

We  think that the  4  questions presented by Professor Deirdre Butler are major questions.

Are students working together? to solve a problema, a to discuss a issue, to create a product?

Have they shared responsabilities? Are the collectivily responsible by the product?

Do they make substantive decisions? Do they decide on product,  how they do the process, about the content?

Is their work interdependent?

Those are fundamental questions  and  we never asked them so clearly. Watching this vídeo warned us to the differences between working together and work collaboratively

Those questions will be  useful in helping us to design,  in the future, collaborative learning activities

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Low level of collaboration
Peer work around a worsheet
High level of collaboration
Preparation of a debate on ethical consumer to provide the tools and resources ywe need to make choices simple, informed and effective (role play)

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It´s very interesting de idea of circle time, but i´m not used to it. I will apply this suggestion in the future. in fact positive and negative aspects can and must be discussed.

In collaborative work some students engage themselves but others don´t.

Technology is very useful and in class i use it frequently. We must show our students that devices can be importanye tools of knowledge.

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I think that the most important advantage of collaborative work is the possibility of peers help. students with better results and mor skills can help those with mor difficulties. Also teacher can be near each student and help more with sucess. Lest but not the least collaborative work can improve interpersonal relationships.