Almost everyone working in schools agrees collaboration is vital for progress, among students, teachers and schools alike. But there is no such agreement on how you can make it happen. Here are some tips, techniques and procedures.
Collaboration is at the heart of SSAT’s work with members and an important theme of many SSAT publications. In his Redesigning Schooling pamphlet on Collaboration, Chris Smith summarised three types of collaboration framework, identifying their features and requirements: radical – doing something completely new; spliced – combining existing approaches in a new way; and knowledge and resource sharing.
The approach of Dene Magna school in Gloucestershire is featured in Personalising Learning 5: Mentoring & coaching, and workforce development.
They use collaboration in a successful peer observation process, in which each member of staff does 14 peer observations per year (some inside their department, some outside and some of their own choosing). This involved:
- all staff members being given an additional non-contact period each week
- reorganisation of the school day (no teaching taking place between 2.30 and 3.30 pm on two days a week)
- establishment of an observation room between two classrooms, in both of which activities were observed and/or recorded to provide DVDs for training purposes
- staff delivering in-service training to one another three times a term.
New York-based former teacher Miriam Clifford offers 20 collaborative learning tips and strategies for teachers:
- Establish group goals
- Keep groups midsized
- Establish flexible group norms
- Build trust and promote open communication
- For larger tasks, create group roles
- Create a pre-test and post-test
- Consider the learning process itself as part of assessment
- Consider using different strategies, like the Jigsaw technique
- Enable groups to reduce anxiety
- Establish group interactions
- Use real world problems
- Focus on enhancing problem-solving and critical thinking skills
- Keep in mind the diversity of groups
- Groups with an equal number of boys and girls are best
- Use scaffolding or diminished responsibility as students begin to understand concepts
- Include different types of learning scenarios
- Technology makes collaborative learning easier
- Keep in mind the critics
- Be wary of ‘group think’
- Value diversity.
Explore Miriam’s 20 tips further.
A key purpose of collaboration is to boost progress across the school or network. The latest paper by John Hattie, celebrated author of Visible Learning, includes a task list for building collaborative expertise:
- Shift the narrative to collaborative expertise and student progression
- Secure agreement about what a year’s progress looks like across all subjects, schools and system levels
- Expect a year’s worth of progress by raising expectations that all students can achieve (see final point)
- Develop new assessment and evaluation tools to provide feedback to teachers
- Ensure teachers have expertise in diagnosis, interventions and evaluation
- Stop ignoring what we know and scale up success by using the wealth of knowledge that exists in teacher communities
- Link autonomy to a year’s progress by studying teachers who are achieving a year of student progress and supporting teachers who aren’t.
An example of the benefits
And the report on SSAT’s Innovation Fellows project emphasises the use of new technologies to enhance learning through collaboration, both within and across the project schools.
Some of the project teams vividly demonstrated the power of social networking, for example when teachers from schools hundreds of miles apart collaborated in depth over several months on their shared projects.
Within a year or so of the project’s completion, more than three-quarters of the teachers involved were promoted or had their roles in/beyond school enhanced.
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