Collaboration November 12, 2008
Posted by mrsuds in collaboration.trackback
Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration.
So what does it actually mean? A colleague of mine, Janet, made a very insightful comment on this – collaboration is more than just sharing. She is exactly right. Collaboration is about building knowledge and skills together. It’s about co-contruction. So how do you get what is quite an isolated profession, teachers, to collaborate? This is the major challenge I face in this job and one I have only tinkered around with this year. That’s mainly because I have spent time focussing on other aspects of the strategic plan and because I want to do it right – otherwise we might not get another opportunity. Teachers can be an unforgiving lot if you waste their time!
I didn’t have an opportunity to plan for this year at the end of the previous year, so this is what I think should happen next year.
- A jumbo day at the start of the year where everyone meets face to face. This is imperative and is something they have done at Volcanics.
- Any meetings need a purpose so I wanted to build meetings around a programme of professional learning related to the Revised Curriculum.
- Other groups provide obvious opportunities for needed collaboration. One example is the Specialist Classroom teacher position.
- Any meetings needed to be calendared at the end of this year – with agreement and buy in from all principals. It is important that meetings don’t become an extra burden. They need to be carefully calendared.
- Collaboration needs to be a part of every school’s strategic plan.
- All teachers have the contact details of others in their learning area / specialist area / year level. I originally planned to use the Moodle as a database for this. Enrol all the teachers into learning area spaces and then use the news forum. The problem is that it will take some time before all teachers have a basic knowledge of how to use the Moodle. Listservs might be a good way of doing this. Conor…how has this gone at Volcanics?
- An online space for the sharing of ideas and resources. This is one of the functions of the Moodle, but as I have already mentioned it will take some time to get all the staff trained in the basics. Mind you, staff were required to upload resources to our Interact site at my previous school and they managed it. That was the key though – they were required to do it.
Anyone else got some good ideas on how to facilitate collaboration? Lets face it, teachers are not used to it are they?
Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)
I think for collaboration to work well people or groups have to work together to build something- a commonality or purpose which is a really hard thing to do across so many schools. What are you trying to build?
Discover IT Tasman cluster where I work is 14 schools and as we exit the final year of our ICTPD cluster some of us look back and see that we were just to geographically diverse and with 14 schools the task was huge.
Good luck
Hi Allanah,
The aim of the collaboration is to build the knowledge of the teachers, especially with reference to the revised curriculum. It’s about professional learning I suppose. It is also about building support networks for teachers in geographically isolated schools (or in some case not).
Yes, I think the task is going to be huge here as well!