QUICK RESOURCE SHEET #81

Collaborative teaching

PREVIOUS TOPICS LISTED AT BOTTOM OF PAGE

Collaborative teaching, where two educators take responsibility for planning, teaching, and monitoring the success of all learners in a class, looks different from day to day and classroom to classroom. Why? Collaborative teaching, when done right, is a dynamic process that educators constantly reconfigure to fit their instructional plans and the learning needs of their students…

Educators should realize two things before they use collaborative teaching. First, collaborative teaching is a fluid process and classroom teaching configurations should change and be responsive to curricular and students’ needs. Second, instructional planning precedes determining how and when to use these teaching configurations.

---from http://www.vcld.org/pages/newsletters/00_01_spring/coll_teach.htm

…creative teaching collaborations can help students avoid seeing the world as “vertically partitioned.” “We don’t want students to graduate from college seeing the world only in terms of their own majors or disciplines,” he says. “As teachers, we have a responsibility to introduce complexity into their educations, because the world and solutions to its problems are complex.

        ---from http://www.indiana.edu/~tandlpub/story.php?story_id=12

http://www.onestopenglish.com/teacher_support/Methodology/Archive/professional-development/collaborative_teaching.htm

“I take Collaborative Teaching to mean more than teaching or planning a class between more than one teacher (although it can take that form). For me, collaborative teaching is about developing different mechanisms of peer support. It is also about developing professionally, but not in isolation. What follows is a series of tips and activities for teachers to do to start collaborative teaching and stop burnout before it occurs.”

http://www.diversityweb.org/Digest/vol9no2/haresign.cfm

“We began with a strategy of infusing diversity in regular freshman seminar classes but made a mid-course change and used diversity as an organizing principle for our new multi-section freshman course, Diversity Issues. The course was collaboratively taught, with up to seven different instructors teaching during the semester. All of the faculty agreed to use one common reading amidst the various individualized syllabi and to discuss gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and religion in that order. The faculty also agreed to include an experiential requirement in which students were to seek out people from different racial or ethnic backgrounds.

Faculty were given a rich array of resources (books, articles, Web sites, videos, model assignments, grading rubrics, etc.) on both diversity and student-centered pedagogy, all supplemented by summer workshops. Faculty also learned how to incorporate service learning into the curriculum…”

http://journals.sped.org/EC/Archive_Articles/VOL.36NO.5MayJune2004_TEC_Keefe%2036-5.pdf

“The concept of collaborative teaching can be extremely unnerving for teachers because it forces them to adjust their teaching styles to accommodate not only the students in the class, but also the extra adult in the room.

Nevertheless, co-teaching when done correctly, provides teachers with more

confidence about working with a diverse population and allows teachers to see their co-workers and students in new ways and establish positive relationships.”

http://www.provost.umich.edu/programs/MLTT/Programs%20in%20Place%20at%20UM.pdf

“Learning communities at Michigan are small groups, often self-selected, of students and faculty members who work together with a set of common intellectual interests and who interact inside and outside of their classrooms. Residential programs are located in a University Residence Hall and require students to live in the hall where the program is housed. Residentially-based learning communities all have in-house academic advisors, a library, a computing site, and a staff of live-in residential staff. Non-residential programs have no residential requirement and are located at different sites on campus. These

programs offer a range of support services that vary from peer advisors to mentors to faculty instructors.”

http://www.provost.umich.edu/programs/MLTT/Collaborative%20Teaching%20Models%20and%20Templates.pdf

“Collaborative teaching includes variation in faculty interactions – but does not involve faculty teaching half-time or part-time. In fact, collaborative teaching usually requires more time and coordination than teaching a course alone. James (1995) advises that the benefits of collaboration have little to do with faculty participating in the administration of a course, but derive from the type and degree of collaboration shared by the faculty members.”

Previous editions of the QUICK RESOURCE SHEET

#1 – Creating quizzes (and more) online                                                         

#2 – Vocabulary builders

#3 – Online discussion groups for English teachers                                    

#4 – Grammar headaches – and how to cure them

#5 – Resources for new teachers                                                     

#6 – International Education Week

#7 – Mentoring programs                                                                    

#8 – Education publications online

#9 – Applied Linguistics                                                                   

#10 – English for Young Learners

#11 – World AIDS Day                                                                      

#12 – Online writing guides

#13 – E-mail exchanges                                                                      

#14 – Free online English courses

#15 – Effective e-mail communication                                             

#16 – Libraries online

#17 – American Studies                                                                     

#18 – Teaching methodologies

#19 – Internet tutorials                                                                       

#20 – Using the newspaper – Part I

#21 – Making books                                                                           

#22 - Using the newspaper – Part II

#23 – Human rights in language teaching

#24 – Blogging

#25 – Poetry and language teaching

#26 – The communicative approach

#27 -  Idioms

#28 – Earth Day

#29 – Alternative assessment

#30 – Peer assessment

#31 – Self-assessment

#32 – Portfolio assessment – Part I

#33 -  Portfolio assessment - Part II (Online Portfolios)

#34 – Intercultural communication

#35 – Teaching Adults

#36 – Learning disorders / Special needs

#37 – Using computers in reading instruction

#38 – Use of authentic materials

#39 – English for Medical Purposes

#40 – Sources for authentic materials

#41 – Education and technology

#42 – Academic writing

#43 – Teaching and stress

#44 – Back to school

#45 – Motivating students

#46 – Action research

#47 – Internet terminology

#48 – Fluency

#49 – Curriculum design

#50 – Pragmatics

#51 - Podcasting for English teachers

#52 – Critical reading

#53 – Learner autonomy

#54 – Scaffolding

#55 – Holidays

#56 – English for Academic Purposes

#57 – Mixed-level classes

#58 – The brain and language learning

#59 – Book clubs/Readers’ groups

#60 – Teachers and technology

#61 – Using video in the language classroom

#62 – Internet-based classroom projects

#63 – Observing student teachers

#64 – Digital literacy

#65 – Group work

#66 – Giving feedback on student writing

#67 – Vlogging

#68 – Educational leadership

#69 – The first five minutes: How to get a class warmed up

#70 – Managing test anxiety

#71 – Developing listening comprehension

#72 – Discourse analysis

#73 – English for Tourism

#74 – Storytelling

#75 – Virtual Learning Environments

#76 – Sociolinguistics

#77 – Corpus Linguistics

#78 – Teaching teenagers

#79 – Lexical Approach

#80 – Humanism in language teaching