Week 5 - Understanding Collaboration: Collaborative Relationships
Reflective Practice:
Choose one of the following resources on collaborative relationships and reflect on the accompanying question in your Reflective Practice journal entry:
a. Collaboration: A literature review Emily R. Lai. Although long, this literature review provides a detailed overview of the research on collaboration between students and includes several suggestions for researched backed collaboration strategies.
In your opinion, what are the most important factors in student-student collaborative relationships?
b. Teacher collaboration and talk in multilingual classrooms
, Review by Jason Cenoz. This article reviews an ethnographic study of the relationship between language and subject teachers in 3 classrooms.
In your opinion, what are the most important factors in teacher-teacher collaborative relationships?
c. Building school-community partnerships: Collaboration for student success
, Review by Hong Soo. This article reviews a book dedicated to providing guidance to educators in building partnerships between schools and communities.
In your opinion, what are the most important factors in school-community collaborative relationships?
*This response should consist of no less than 250 words and no more than 500 words.
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Selection: Building school-community partnerships: Collaboration for student success
, Review by Hong Soo. This article reviews a book dedicated to providing guidance to educators in building partnerships between schools and communities.
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Discussion Post:
We will use the Thinking Routine Options Explosion for this week's discussion board post.
1. Read the following IB resources on collaboration:
Read the following article: Teaching focus on effective teamwork and collaboration
Watch the following video: Social Skills: Collaboration
2. Describe a problem that you have experienced, or experience regularly with collaborative relationships. This problem can be centered around situations in the classroom (e.g. assessing students who don't contribute, students that refuse to collaborate, collaborating with parents, etc.) or situations that you have experienced directly (e.g. a teaching partner that does not collaborate, a school project in which a partner refused to collaborate, etc.). Post the problem to the discussion board. (This is your original post)
3. Use the following instructions to come up with a solution to someone else's problem. (This is your response post)
List the obvious solutions. There would not be a decision unless there were at least two or three obvious options.
Now brainstorm all sorts of different solutions to find the "hidden" solution. Often there are hidden solutions that are the real best choices. Be imaginative! Piggyback on ideas already explored in the resources, combine ideas to get new ones, look for ideas of a very different kind, imagine you are in different roles and suggest ideas from the perspective of those roles, etc.
Ask: What have we learned about the situation from finding these solutions? This is a way of understanding the situation better.
*This response should be concise, consisting of no more than a few sentences for each question.
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As a Department Head I am familiar with working in situations wherein new staff are under the impression that all planning and preparation is done for them and to a degree this is true however, on the other hand, there is a degree of initiative and responsibility that we sometimes require of our staff members when coming into a new environment.
More recently though, as a Vice-Principal, I have encountered a situation wherein there are three teachers, one of which being myself, teaching the same course. Normally discrepencies would not be a big deal, but in this case it was in a course that students understand as "high stakes" in their requirements for university applications, ENG4U.
The incoming teacher is a nice person and an esteemed colleague with experience well beyond myself and my colleague who I have been working with in the past.
Understanding that the incoming teacher is experienced and versed in different professional settings we established a specific afternoon at the beginning of the semester to bring together myself, my colleague and the new colleague of ours. In this afternoon, our goal was to establish the long range plan and organize the assessments/evaluations that will take place in the coming semester in regards to the ENG4U course.
That being said, each time we went through a unit, the incoming colleague was "okay" with everything as it was previously done. My colleague and I discussed some small technical changes here and there based on our previous semester, but overall, pretty similar to the past. Each time, I checked with the new colleague, "what do you think?" There was a couple times they asked about the flexibility in alignment, we explained the school expectations and principal's expectations over this class. Again, each time we talked it out, we ended up making a few adjustments according to their preference, but ultimately in the end it was in vain. Yes, we built a talking a space, we shook hands, had lunch and chit chat from time to time as a group, but around mid-term, the principal calls us into the office, and organizes a topical discussion on alignment.
Needless to say, there were more than a few discrepencies and the new colleague didn't feel there was anything wrong with that. the changes/discrepencies were not unbearable by any means from where we sat in the room hearing it for the first time, but in terms of understanding student mindsets, my colleague and I who had worked together in the past, knew exactly where the conversation was going and reiterated the importance in mainting transparency with the students and colleagues, collaboration, etc.
Our new colleague was receptive, but just felt that day-to-day they are still getting to know their students and the english level being as low in the school as it was, required more, TLC. They ultimately felt they underestimated the language barrier that the students would be facing in this course/school.
Long since, we worked it out and created a section that allowed for the teacher to have their own sandbox of the course (in a manner of speaking), but this solution was not what we had hoped for, ultimately the desire of the new colleague was that the school build strong language support systems to better prepare the students for the activities that they were being as to do.
Thank you for taking the time to read about this experience.
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