Post 2: Collaborative Inquiry

Discuss how you and your staff, have or may have engaged in collaboration. What were some of the positive attributes? How did it strengthen relationships? How did it build on school success? How does/did the collaboration support the Ministry’s polices to support ELLs? Think about the Collaborative Inquiry. How does it play an important role within the school community?

My teaching experience at this school in China has required an enormous amount of collaboration. Painful amounts of it actually. For the positive aspects of the collaboration, we are not only working within our departments but as a faculty to better acquire and produce methods of teaching to ELL learning needs.

As a department it is important that our collaboration is not mistaken for cookie cutting methods of teaching I feel. It feels as though the department expects to be run in a uniform model though. We are engaging in collaborative inquiry through our development of system wide course/department materials as well. I am a department head of the Senior English Department of our campus and was asked to participate in the collaboration of rubric development across the board for English classes. The process was long and daunting but allowed for me to bring to light some ideas that I thought were important to mention. there was also opportunities for others to add and subtract what they thought was important to keep in the rubric. The collaboration supports the ministries policies in equitable teaching. Allowing all students an equal opportunity of success and feedback. Having a system that cycles through teachers rampantly means there are varying levels of teachers with varying resources throughout the system which obviously means more experienced teachers who are providing challenging yet successful assessments and learning opportunities are being asked why their students are working harder than those on another campus. Therefore students are not being passed through the course or being too challenged, a healthy mix is provided.

This is a strengthening experience for a staff when people are open minded and collaborating. I have seen CI's go sour before-its unfortunate an awkward, but it happens if you have a tyrant at the head of the table. With that being said though, Our current initiative to support ELL is a home room reading program, it is relatively successful but we are still collecting data to highlight shortcomings and successes through the pilot program.

One recent success we have had (maybe the most successful yet) was through the collaboration between the middle school teachers and the High School teachers during a High School Entrance Exam moderation marking session/cross grading. The entrance exam to the provincial program was being marked and teachers were able to suggest that if students are "given a shot" or "chance to get into the next level", that its maybe doing them wrong.

We do a lot of cross grading within our department which keeps teachers on point and fair between students who need ELL accommodations and others who are enrolled in the full English Grade classes.