What Is Collaborative Teaching?

From the years past, the educationalists and practitioners have been advocating the need for creative learning at the early ages of children. In the process, they summarized the need for Collaborative learning and its impact on children to build a bright communication. If we hit back to history, Watson and Crick who are the founders of Google worked on the collaborative computer labs that now turned into a biggest platform.

Collaborative learning teams are said to attain high-level thinking and that preserves the information longer times than individual learning. Collaborative learning creates the space for discussions, raising doubts, clarifying the ideas and evaluating the information shared between each other. This altogether bulks in more information and knowledge sharing. This information gained will be retained in long-term memory.

Teaching children how to collaborate and learn creates vast experiences of learning the things interacting with the fellow mates. It is an excellent way to develop a fluid class room that builds confidence in children as learners.

Collaborative Teaching

Collaborative teaching, sometimes called co-teaching, is when multiple teachers work together in a learning community for the benefit of many children. They cooperatively work together to teach the same group of students together. Collaborative teaching provides opportunities for holistic education and helps students in many ways bringing out the social skills in them.

The main aim of this collaborative teaching is to impart education in the right way equally to all the students. As the group of teachers involves for a single goal, the final results will be ultimately remarkable.

In the current generation, a shift of thought should be from traditional teaching methods to adopting collaborative teaching environments right from the early school days. This makes students actively involved in learning rather than following the instructions to accomplish the given task.

How Does This Teaching Work?

This collaborative teaching involves multiple teachers is the combination of interdependence of skills, knowledge, experience and expertise. This teaching environment offers the students to understand the topic in different perspectives and dimensions. For teachers, this collaborative teaching helps in exploring the topics to present them in a more creative way to make it an interesting subject to the students.

The completeness to collaborative teaching comes when each of the individuals acknowledge each of the group’s contributions. For collaborative teaching phenomenal based teaching is the holistic approach which involves changing the focus of learning from subjects to phenomena.

Know The Anatomy Of Effective Collaboration

To make the collaborative teaching more impactful, the teachers should incorporate the art of thoughtful considerations on the part of students. The teacher must set the developing lessons, and the appropriate teaching techniques to use with the specific students or the group of students altogether.

In most of the schools the schedule for this collaborative teaching was designed a year ahead to coordinate with their efforts of delivering the topic more planned and effective.

Collaborative skills in students can be developed in two levels to empower them for the opportunities they have. The most connecting aspect and in fact the outcome of this collaborative learning is that it creates an environment where children who might have been labelled as “Low Ability” make leaps and bounds of progress believing in themselves as learners. This helps them in interdependency for certain things to address.

Now let us understand how all these can be achieved. What are the processes or approaches we employed at Walkertown to make it a grand success?

How Can This Collaborative Teaching Be Implemented?

We have purposefully figured the key concepts or areas to start with.

1. Teaching Children on “How to Collaborate?” and
2. Creating a certain environment to promote collaborative learning.

Start With Small Steps

Starting collaborative teaching may not require to be with the subject or from books. We would rather encourage beginning it from very basic tasks. We make the students find the partners of their choice to learn together. 

This might be a lame guide, but some children who are less interactive will enforce themselves to interact with their classmates. This injects them to be collaborative and communicative throughout.

Embedding Collaborative Learning

This makes the teaching process easy as it helps you in making the subject interactive rather than one-way.  The child being involved in group education or learns in pairs with other students, engages in different learning activities.

In most of the preschools, technology embedded activities are promoted like looking at the computers for the stories in particular, which offers a wide range of possibilities for collaborative learning in the zone of proximal development. In this pattern of learning, children were put together to discuss and share the ideas of what they have observed. Developing strong communication and coordination, students will make individual progress working towards a common goal.

Another way to embed collaborative learning is through phenomenal-learning which broadens the scope of learning from individual subjects to phenomena, topics, events and from technology. 

On a while embedding collaborative learning helps students in many ways bringing the benefits for learning and growth of the students. Some of the key benefits include,

Celebration of Diversity, in collaborative learning, pupils open up to very diverse and new perspectives of life from the peers. They reflect the circumstances against the other students and then learn to acknowledge the difference when it is critical.

Interpersonal Development, interacting with the people around us is as important as learning the subject. Collaborative learning enables students to speak out and discuss the activities around them.

Embedded Learning, Collaboration embeds stronger knowledge than that of individual learning as they listen and speak on the topic. The word from his close friend or the partner in task stays longer with the context.

Inclusivity, No student is “average” until they are marked out of certain outcomes from them. They have the internal strength of understanding and analysing their friends actions and words, even if they value and appreciate them. Effective collaborative learning recognises the merit of each student.

Know About The Types Of Collaborative Teachings

1.    Simultaneous Teaching

This mode of teaching is almost similar to regular teaching. One difference is, in this teaching pattern there are two teachers and the entire class is divided into two and then teachers have the session simultaneously for two groups on the same topic at same time. This promotes the students in knowing the same topic in two different perspectives thus making it registered for long time memory.

2.    Instructional Stations

In most of the schools and classes, the strength of students is more making teachers to sometimes miss interacting with few students. In these instructional stations, the students were grouped and assigned different tasks. Based on the task completion, the students were then instructed to move to another task station. This promotes students to learn multiple aspects from a single session of class.

3.    Lead-Observe-Assist

As this collaborative teaching involves multiple teachers, one teacher will lead the topic and explain the details of it. The other teacher then observes if all the students are getting the topic right and understanding the intent correctly. On the other hand, another teacher will assist the student in understanding the sessions. This teaching process helps in addressing all the students and helping them to collaborate and understand.

4.    Teach and Reteach

This is almost like the previous pattern but in this technique, the lead teacher gives the course explanation and material to the students whereas the co-instructor reviews everything taught and takes the session forward by evaluating each student’s performance from tests.

5.    Supplemental Teaching

In supplemental teaching, the classroom is divided into two groups, one with majority of strength and the other with some less strength compared to the first one. The lead teacher will instruct the larger group and the co-teacher instructs the smaller group.

Cooperative And Collaborative Learning

Collaborative learning is a mode of learning where each student makes a progressive improvement in-line with the others. This creates a scope to learn to manage the methods of any activity without the further instructions from adults or any other. There are quite good benefits of Collaborative learning as the learning is group-structured. This helps them in knowing their strengths and interests.

In cooperative learning the students interdependently relies on each other in the group to achieve their common goal. When needed, they clearly map out the roles and responsibilities to take among themselves to accomplish the given tasks.

To Conclude,

In the modern and changing world, collaboration and cooperation are the keys that develop social skills in the place of working together. Our formulation of teaching patterns were solely based on this principle. We at Walkertown help your student imbibing the skills of team work and team communication right from the early age.