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4.7 Irish teachers’ reflections on teacher collaboration
The time factor is in fact the key to an effective collaboration. In our schools we are submerged with having to teach many classes and doing many tasks in the middle of that process. Teachers are tired and on top of that there are the disciplinary problems they have to deal with. When teachers meet and work together they are often using their personal time, obviously our profession cannot depend on the good will of the teachers.

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4.5 Skills and conditions needed for teacher collaboration
Teaching students to work in a collaborative way as part of the initial teacher education will motivate and prepare them to work that way right from the beginning of their career, they’ll do it naturally once they start working in schools. Majella pointed out the skills needed by teachers to work collaboratively with other teachers - knowledge, skills, attitudes, motivation.  The ethical dimension and having the required personal and emotional skills to work as a group are extremely important as well.  But she also underlined the need of ground work ahead of time, that’s why some teachers say collaborative work involves much time spent around a lesson. But sitting together and discussing lesson plans and teaching methods is important because it helps teachers to develop leadership skills against isolated practices when we close the door of our classroom behind us.

4.6 How technology can facilitate teacher collaboration
I think that none of us would believe if some decades ago we were told that during our career we would be able to share, display, collaborate, process, analyse!  Technology has been “the” amazing invention if we want to put that way.

I do agree we sometimes don’t move beyond sending and displaying and we need to move beyond to where we are processing, analysing and sharing, but then, that is what this MOOC is for, right?

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Module 4: How can teacher collaboration facilitate collaborative learning?

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Module 4: How can teacher collaboration facilitate collaborative learning?

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4.2 A primary school teacher’s experience of teacher collaboration
I could easily relate to Valentina’s words when she says that it is difficult to “watch over a group of 20-25 children during the lesson and consider their learning tempo and assist them when they are experiencing difficulties”. Although older, teaching a foreign language to 28 students’ class and having the worst of times trying to make them actually talk it’s a nightmare. In order to allow the students to practice the orality the class should be divided in two groups.

Like she says, working in a collaborative model demands a lot of time from the teachers, both before classes, planning and organizing and after, assessing the work that was done, the effectiveness of the planning, reformulating the planning, analyzing the students response to what was done… It is also true that many teachers are not available to work that way. They are afraid of letting someone else enter “their space” and of being judged by that other person. I would be delighted to have someone sharing the classroom space with me, the space could be organized in a different way and we could implement different strategies according to the students needs.

4.3 A secondary teacher’s experience of teacher collaboration
The fact that digital technologies can bring specific benefits to facilitate the process of teacher collaboration is undeniable. Reyhan describes the importance of collaborating with teachers and experts beyond your school to create new ideas and exchange best practices, and in fact that is a fantastic way of putting you close to colleague teachers around the world. Never had technology been so friendly to education and the teaching and learning process. The problem is young people were already born in that era, whereas most of the teachers are still learning their way around them. Students learn computer language just like that, even almost by intuition, and many teachers have a hard time understanding the basics. So it’s not difficult to understand that many teachers are still reluctant to work with digital technologies, they don’t have the required skills to take advantage of them.  I had never heard of epals but I am curious to learn about it. I have worked with eTwinning some years ago. Thanks to eTwinning I met a Danish colleague and we have been collaborating regularly every year since the last six years. That and a Comenius project are my experiences in collaborative work.

4.4 The benefits and challenges of teacher collaboration
What Deirdre had to say is so true! She empathized the benefits but she also highlighted the challenges teachers have to face regarding teacher collaboration. Nowadays there is a whole world out of our classroom “stalking” our students and we just can’t you pretend it has nothing to do with us. However I take two of the challenges she points out, the need of a supportive school culture and the fact that schools have to build in time for teacher collaboration in teachers’ schedules. If these two conditions are met, we’ll be more than half way to putting teachers working in a collaborative way.

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3.8 Answers to teachers’ questions on assessing collaborative learning .
In traditional school, teachers were the only ones with the power to assess. When passing to another form of teaching/learning and implementing self and peer assessment, there’s the risk of the students being either too hard on their peers or not impartial towards their friends work on the one hand but, on the other hand, having the possibility of assessing their peers work as well as their own, makes them much more responsible thus helping them become independent learners.

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3.5 An ICT teacher’s experience of assessing students’ collaborative learning
The 7 benefits are very rightly associated to assessing collaborative learning. The group dynamics, team management and the needed time to prepare and implement the assessment of collaborative learning in the classroom are in fact challenges we all face when engaging in such a learning scenario. Reorganising the classroom takes precious time we sometimes cannot afford to lose. Ideally the classroom should be in such a way we wouldn’t need to constantly change it. But that’s only possible when each class has its classroom and that’s not how schools are usually organised in Portugal. Interdisciplinary teaching is a very valuable tip, and collaborative work among teachers also.

3.6 Collaborative learning and student peer reviews
Very good work Anna does with her students. I dare say that is the ideal way to work. We are all trying to go there and do our best in the meanwhile! Regarding the work groups’ formation, I think you can do it both ways, it all depends on the goals you want to achieve. Sometimes you need to form them the way you consider the best, other times you let the students be free to join who they want. If it helps their motivation and they work in a responsible way, it's even better.
Peer reviews is a great way of transferring responsibility to the students. Being in the referee's shoes allows them to look at their work in a different light. Later they will be more meticulous when working on their own tasks. The tools mentioned are also good tips.

3.7 Collaborative learning - What to assess and how?
Till now I have used basic checklists with criteria such as cooperation, autonomy, responsibility, capacity to solve problems … The rubrics and checklist examples we have been given are quite useful and they enable us to prepare our own according to our students’ characteristics. Preparing them with the help of the students after defining the outcomes had never occurred to me but it can also be a good way of involving the students in their learning process.

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Module 3: How can you assess collaborative learning?

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Module 3: How can you assess collaborative learning?

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3.3 Assessment for improving collaborative learning
Indeed for me assessing is the biggest difficulty concerning group work. Perhaps once it becomes a general practice it will become easier but for the time being I can’t help fearing being unfair in some way. Right from the beginning it is difficult to create relatively heterogeneous groups. Almost always there are students who would rather work alone because their main concern is having good marks and they fear their colleagues may be a setback.  Also, on the other hand some students may try to work as little as possible and benefit from the work of others. This may in fact discourage teachers from using collaborative work. So I think this is the ongoing challenge regarding collaborative learning, the pupils are still learning to take responsibility for their team work and the teachers are trying to find the best way to assess their work fairly. But we must consider the choice of assessment model according to each project or task. Professor Luís Valente gives us examples of rubrics and checklists, pointing out that they are important because they are very clear instruments for assessment, flexible and effective for self- and peer-assessment. He reminds us that the checklists can be very useful and the simpler they are, the higher their value.

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2.6 Module 2 Learning Activity
With the help of the code I could confirm what I had instinctively decided about my two activities. The rubric is a very useful tool to help us categorize the collaboration level of the tasks according to the goals we had planned.

Low level activity:
The students just had to chose among their set of words which one would suit the context the best and propose it to the group. Together they would decide if that was the best choice.
High level activity:

- Do they work together? They had to. Like a puzzle,  each member of the group had individual tasks that would come together and form the group work.

- Do they have shared responsibility? Who does what and how they will present the results? Each group member was allowed to volunteer to do a certain part of the work.

- Do they make substantive decisions? They had to decide the key points of their workplan, who did what and how they would do it in order to achieve the best result possible.

- Was their work interdependent? Through the whole process they had to discuss and negotiate what would each student’s role be, which task one needed to carry out to would be done be and how they would gather all contributions in order to .  Each student’s contribution is needed to complete the final group work.

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2.5 Collaborative learning scenarios
These scenarios are very helpful and an important tool to make you think of all the steps you should follow while designing a collaborative assignment. However, once you move from theory to practice all that was planned may not be so easy to follow.  That is why they are a good source of inspiration but you will probably need to adapt them to your own context, to that particular class characteristics. Sometimes the students themselves find a way of making a “detour” from your initial planning, and when it meets their needs or preferences and if it doesn’t compromise the goal of the activity, there will probably be no problem at all.

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Module 2: How can you design collaborative learning in the classroom?

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Module 2: How can you design collaborative learning in the classroom?

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2.2 Embedding collaborative learning into lesson design
Collaborative learning is a class design that aims at promoting autonomy, motivating students to knowledge and allowing students with different learning rhythms to participate and for once feel part of one same class. However, it is a path that both students and teachers must walk, step by step.  Not only students have to become more and more used to working this way, but teachers also need to share the same language. They must be tuned, to discuss among them and they need to be aware of the difficulties they may find along the way and how to get around them.

2.3 The 4 Collaboration Questions
- Are the students working together?
- Do they make substantial decisions?
- Do they share responsibility?
- Is their work interdependent?
These are the key questions of the collaborative learning. I think we may say the interdependency and shared responsibility of all members of the group are the main issues that make teachers feel reluctant towards using this learning design. If we have a positive feedback when making these questions we will have achieved the main goals of collaborative learning.

2.4 21 CLD Collaboration Rubric
This rubric was described quite clearly and it was easy to understand. I have never used this tool and actually I had never seen it before. Asking the four questions when designing a class will indeed force you to find tools to assess the students’ work. It can be rather difficult to find evidence of the students’ collaboration when implementing collaborative tasks.

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Module 1: What is collaborative learning?

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Module 1: What is collaborative learning?

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1.6 Module 1 Learning Activity

Low level collaboration activity

The group has a text with blank spaces and each student has a different set of words to fill in the spaces. They must search and decide among each other which is the suitable word for each space.

High level collaboration activity

In a flipped classroom, the students had to work on the house compartments and each compartment’s furniture. They should make a video to present the class. They made the plan of their work in class, each member of the group made researches regarding the furniture related to one or two  compartments, they shared the information with the other members of the group, they met outside the class to actually make the video in one of their homes and finally they made the presentation to the class, each member of the group describing his compartment.

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João da Silva Secondary School is the headquarters of a group of 7 schools, covering all levels of education from kindergarten to the 12th grade. It is a modern school, well equipped in terms of technology. Every classroom has a pc and a smartboard. Communication between the Headmistress and the teachers and among the teachers is done via email. All school and students’ information such as class summaries, scheduled assignments, tests, grades, students' behaviour, absences … can be found in the school’s moodle and parents can access them from home or from an APP in their smartphone.

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About me                                                                                                                                                               

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About me                                                                                                                                                               

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Hello! My name is Teresa and I teach French in a public secondary school in the North of Portugal.

The current school year I teach 5 classes, a total of 137 students from 12 to 20 years old. I’m lucky because I do what I like for a living and I’ve been doing it for 33 years. However, our profession has had quite a few setbacks over the last years, mainly due to the economic crisis our country has been facing. Teachers feel their work is not recognised, they spend many hours at school, they are underpaid and much energy is spent over paperwork tasks.

School has been losing its privileged place as the place to get knowledge due to the ICT “revolution”. Students are much more motivated by all they can learn outside the school than by what we have to offer them in the classroom.

So, not to “lose the battle”, schools and teachers should be able to “fight back” with the same “weapons”! That is why it is important for teachers to constantly improve their teaching skills as well as their technological knowledge.