Expanded Collaboration is important to the success of each student. There is a saying of "it takes a village to raise a child." Well that is true for students as well. It takes all stakeholders involved to help the student in their educational process. Expanded collaboration begins with the teacher and student relationship. The first couple weeks of school are critical in developing a relationship between the teacher and the student. The teacher can foster this relationship by conferencing with each student to get to know them as a person and as a learner. Then comes the relationship between the teacher and the parent. It is important to establish a relationship with parents and guardians that involves trust and open communication.
Embedded Files
Onside Learning, 2014
Expanded collaboration can also involve other staff members, peers, and community members. The benefits of collaboration are so impactful to a child's education and to a teacher's growth and development of instructional practice. "Collaborative learning has been shown to not only develop higher-level thinking skills in students, but boost their confidence and self-esteem as well. Group projects can maximize educational experience by demonstrating the material, while improving social and interpersonal skills. Students learn how to work with various types of learners and develop their leadership skills." (Gates, 2018). Expanded collaboration is simple to set in motion in your class and can be very impactful on the learning and success of the student. Students can collaborate with teachers to set goals, conference on growth areas, and collaborate with peers for a common goal. "Effective collaboration depends on good communication practices. Examples of high-impact collaboration practices include: collaborative lesson planning across providers (particularly in a multi-tiered system of supports), collaboration with parents and caregivers to extend the teaching and learning process “beyond the bell,” and collaboration with student support personnel like related-service providers and paraprofessionals." (DeHartchuck, 2021).
Instances of Effectively Coaching Learners
Instances of Effectively Coaching Learners
Peer Feedback
Peer collaboration is important for students to be able to have in order to enhance their learning experiences. Teachers giving feedback is also important, but hearing it from your peers can sometimes have a greater impact. To the right, you can find a Flipgrid Peer Feedback form by Beth Flaherty that models for students how to give kind, specific, and helpful feedback. This anchor chart helps students visually see sentence starters for each section. To help my students, I instruct them that they must go in order and use those sentence starters for guidance. Students do not have to use those exact sentence starters, but they are a good start for students beginning the peer feedback process. Next, the student must give specific feedback to their peer about their video, writing, or project. Lastly, they can ask the student a helpful question that can guide them to making changes to improve their assignment.
Credit: Beth Flaherty
Here is another example of a Peer Feedback Choice Board from Catlin Turner that students can use. "Feedback is how students feel seen and supported. It is also how we communicate to our students that we value the process over the product. When we give feedback as students work, we signal that the work they are doing is important, and we care about their progress." (Turner, 2021).
STEM
STEM Projects are very important in promoting collaboration between students and our community partners. Our school is a STEM certified school that values collaboration with peers, teachers, and community partners. This year our fifth graders are working with Club Car, a community partner, on designing accessories to make a golf car more marketable for a specific region. Club Car kicked off the yearlong project with our students in September. They presented to them a problem that they needed the students' help to solve.
Each month, Club Car will bring their team to come collaborate with the students about their project. Students will work in pairs or groups to design their accessory for their golf car. The team members will then collaborate with the students in their progression of the accessory development. The pictures above are from the first session of collaboration between the students and Club Car. This month, students will work with team members on developing their model, sketch, and plan to create their prototype for their accessory. This collaboration is allowing students to be involved in real world problem solving skills and also gives them insights into skills needed for the future workforce.
Group Roles
For science this year, STEMScopes from Accelerate Learning Inc, our science curriculum, has created project based learning projects for each unit. The circuits and electricity PBL is a project called Sound Up. For each project, there are different roles the students must be for the project. Each role has a specific task to complete for the project. The very first PBL that the students complete, we go in depth about how to pick the roles for group members and how to understand the expectations of that role. Students will collaborate together as they work as a team to each do their part to complete the project. Each time we do a new PBL for the end of unit tasks, the students must change up their group role from the one they were in the previous PBL. It really shows students how each member of the team is valued and important to the final outcome of the project.
Tools or Strategies
Google Slides or Canva
To promote collaboration through discussions, I use Google Slides or Canva. Each of these platforms allows for me, as the teacher, to pose questions to the students. Then students will discuss their thinking and reasoning about the question and find an answer to the question. In Canva, I use the interactive whiteboard to pose a question and the students respond on the sticky notes their answer. This allows for the class to see everyones responses and can enhance the discussion time. In Google Slides, I can create a template where the students have a slide for their group and put their answer on their designated slide. When teachers create an environment for discussion it can really get the students thinking deeper and having to use their voice as a tool for collaboration. "Moreover, teachers need to provide the opportunity to students for a managed discussion about their learning. Discussion that has a purpose with substantive comments that build off each other and there is a meaningful exchange between students that results in questions that promote deeper understanding." (Neff).
Ditch That Textbook (2021)
Curriculum Associates: iReady
iReady
iReady is our learning platform and curriculum for math. We use it everyday as students progress through lessons and take assessments. This is a great tool for teachers to use as a quick assessment of students progression towards mastery.
In the images to the right, you can see a snapshot of data collected from my students comprehension check on Understand Powers of 10. From this data, I will pull students 1 - 11 the next day, at different times, to do a reteach of the lesson. The next image shows students 12-18 that missed one or two questions that just need some redirection or correction on misunderstandings. Students 19 - 22 need an extension and enrichment activity to complete the next day because they showed mastery of the standard!!
In the classroom, I use the comprehension checks as a quick check after a topic or lesson. Comprehension checks are about 5 questions. This can provide instant feedback that allows me to create groups for the next day. The following day I use as collaboration opportunity to meet with the students to discuss their progress and correct any misunderstandings.
Building Relationships with All Stakeholders
Building Parent Relationships
Remind 101 is a great tool that is completely free for users. It is an app that allows you to be connected to others without having to use your individual phone number! To the right under the image, you can see how Remind offers communication from teachers to students, and teachers to parents/guardians. Using Remind allows me, the teacher, to keep parents informed daily on assignments, projects, tests and quizzes, and special announcements. This also allows parents to talk privately with the teacher if they have any concerns they may want to voice.
Another strategy I use to build relationships with the parents of my students is through Google Form Surveys. At the beginning of the year, I have parents fill out a Google Form Survey, that you can find HERE, about their student. The questions are not all academic questions. The questions are about their hopes for their child in fifth grade, describing their child in three words, sharing their child's strengths, and sharing growth areas they see for their child. The success of the student involves all stakeholders and it is important to know that child from all perspectives. Whether it be their own self perspective, their parent/guardian perspective, or the teacher perspective, all are important for understanding the child as a student and how to help them be successful.
A great way to build parent relationships is to utilize parent email communication frequently. Teachers are quick to email a parent if students are misbehaving, but parents also need to hear the amazing and good things their child is doing. It doesn't have to be academically based to provide positive feedback to parents about their child.
Building Teacher Relationships
Involving all stakeholders in the instructional process don't just include the student and parents. It also includes your teammates and staff members. It is important for teachers to be able to collaborate together to improve the instructional plans for the students. "Working together may make it easier for teachers to identify and address problems in students’ progress, share information about individual students from grade to grade or develop curricula and approaches to teaching that are consistent and coherent across grades and subject areas." (Teachers engaging in collaboration opportunities can share ideas, think about new innovative ways to share the information, and enhance the learning of students. "When we work together, we create a better learning experience. Teacher collaboration positively impacts student achievement, and allows us as educators to explore new territory." (Gates, 2018). To the left you see our collaborative planning minutes sheet for my school. We use this to record our ideas and make sure we have plans for moving forward.
Another great way to expand collaboration for teachers is to provide professional learning development time for teachers to attend. Our district provides professional learning days where other teachers can present and share instructional strategies that work in their classroom. This allows teachers from all different schools in the county to come together and collaborate with each other. Schools can also provide teachers to attend conferences with other teachers from the state to work together and extend their collaboration and ideas with each other. Teacher collaboration is vital to teacher growth and development. Teachers are life-long learners and need to continue to grow and develop in instructional strategies to enhance the learning experiences of their students.
Building Student Relationships
I always tell my students at the beginning of the year that they will spend more awake hours during the week with their classmates than their own family members. I tell them that we can become our own family at school. To build the relationships between students and between the students and the teacher, we can use Morning Meeting. Morning Meeting is set for the morning and can set the tone for students the rest of the day. During the Morning Meeting, students will engage in a greeting, a sharing time, an activity, and then a morning message. The goal of Morning Meeting is to "set the tone for respectful learning, establish a climate of trust, motivate students to feel significant, create empathy and encourage collaboration, and support social, emotional, and academic learning." (Responsive Classroom, 2015).
Pathway 2 Success. - Kristina (2021)
Timely Personal Interaction
Every Lesson Matters (2022)
Student - Teacher Conferences:
It is important for teachers and students to meet individually and conference to monitor the student's progress. I meet with each student individually at the beginning of the year after they have taken their beginning of the year benchmark. This time allows the student and I to discuss their strengths and their areas for growth. We set long term goals of what we want to achieve on the mid year benchmark that will be taken in December or January. But we also set short term goals of the steps we will use to work towards meeting that long term goal. To the left, you see a planning sheet that shows our diagnostic assessment planning sheet. This planning sheet is the beginning of conversation between
To the right you can see an exert from a personalized learning plan that I developed for my students based on their diagnostic assessment growth areas. Students are given links, video lessons, and activities to work on to master the standard of their personalized learning plan. In the activities, students will be given a conference time to meet with me to complete activities to deepen their understanding of their standard.
To the left, you see a final reflection that students complete as they finish their personalized learning plan. Once a student completes the personalized learning plan reflection, the student and I will sit down to conference about their reflection and discuss the questions that they answered in their reflection. This helps the teacher and the student to see if the learning plan was successful for the student in meeting their goal, or what revisions need to be made for the future.
Exit Tickets
Exit tickets are very easy to use in the classroom that give instant data on your students' understandings. Exit tickets provide timely feedback for teachers and can also provide timely feedback for students. By using Exit Tickets, the teacher can quickly glance at the level of understanding for students. He/She can then use that data to meet with groups of students next day based on the responses on the exit ticket. To the right you can two examples of exit tickets that I use in my classroom for math. These are quick, simple 3 question exit tickets from Stellar Teacher by Sarah Marye.
From Loravore Learning by: Erika Tate
Padlet Interactions
Padlet is an excellent resource that provides a great layout and opportunity for collaboration. As the teacher, I can post items, articles, and activities on the Padlet and then have my students work from the Padlet. I can pose questions on the Padlet and have students be able to respond in a timely manner. This allows students to collaborate and interact with each other. Students can read other peers responses to questions. Students can even pose a question to another student. The teacher can also have students respond to each other in a section of the Padlet.
References
DeHartchuck, Lindsay. (2021, August 3). National Center for Learning Disabilities. Collaboration: Partnering With Colleagues, Families, and Caregivers to Promote Student Success.
Gates, S. (2018, October 18). Benefits of Collaboration | NEA.
Retrieved from https://www.nea.org/professional-excellence/student-engagement/tools-tips/benefits-collaboration
Miller, M. (2022). Ditch That Textbook.
Retrieved from: https://ditchthattextbook.com/student-collaboration-in-shared-google-slides/
Neff, L. (n/d). Lev Vygotsky and Social Learning Theories.
Retrieved from https://jan.ucc.nau.edu/lsn/educator/edtech/learningtheorieswebsite/vygotsky.htm
Onside Learning. (2014). Video retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po40I4c94R0
Schleifer, D., Rinehart, C., & Yanisch, T. (2017). Teacher Collaboration In Perspective: A Guide To Research.
Retrieved from: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED591332.pdf
Tate, Erika. (2020, October 20). BLUEKNOWLEDGE. LoravoreⓇ Learning | Building a Learning Community with Padlet.
Turner, C. (2021, April 27). Peer Feedback: Making It Meaningful.
Retrieved from https://catlintucker.com/2021/04/peer-feedback/
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