COLLABORATION In Teacher Professional Development WHAT IS COLLABORATION

COLLABORATION In Teacher Professional Development

WHAT IS COLLABORATION? • A solution oriented professional development strategy, pulling people together in small groups, to guide each other to an ultimate goal.

THE COLLABORATIVE LIFE CYCLE • The Primary focus of collaboration is the learner • Working in groups is a critical mode of learning • Structural approaches to the development of solutions to real-world problems must be incorporated.

PEER-TO-PEER TEACHING • Involves working in pairs or small groups to discuss concepts and find solutions to problems • Learner’s responsibility is to review, organize, consolidate existing knowledge, fill in the gaps, and to find greater meaning in reformulating knowledge on the subject. • Students helping each other helps each of them because one learns, and one reinforces their own knowledge.

MASTERY LEARNING WITH COLLABORATION • Benjamin Bloom • Applies principles of individualized instruction, and tutoring to a whole class learning objective. • Progress checks are done throughout the process rather than waiting until the end. • How it helps: 1. Individual feedback 2. Diagnosed learning needs and challenges 3. Prescribes needed remediation and enrichment 4. Parallel formative assessment is done to re-asses after • What it does: 1. Credits the students whether it is peer-to-peer, small group, or whole class with the fact that each student learns at a different pace. 2. Each learner learns the same information, at a pace they can be comfortable with 3. The collaboration can bring the entire class to a higher level of achievement, if this is done correctly

IN CONCLUSION • Collaborative teaching and collaborative learning makes teachers and students interact with each other for a common goal. • The peer-to-peer helps the learners reinforce each other and develop each other to higher achievement levels • Mastery enables the learner to know their level of progress in learning along the way. If there is a need for correction, it is done at that time. • A combination of using both methods, is what I suggest.