Collaboration , Co-teaching & Curriculum

What is happening in the curriculum and the learning environment of the school when there is a school-wide learning commons? On this page, you will find tutorials and examples of partnered learning experiences by specialists and classroom teachers. We call these websites the home of a learning experience where both adults and learners are working together on projects. The major difference is that these collaborative unit websites go far beyond a list of assignments, deadlines, and grading. Instead, they are dynamic collaborative environments where everyone in the "project" is working, collaborating, communicating, and producing to achieve major objectives.

Two Major Collaborative Learning Environments

Create a Knowledge Building Center

Build your own collaborative website specialists and classroom teachers partner to conduct inquiry by individuals or groups in a virtual learning experience together with their students. The focus is on what we all a major umbrella question or topic under which students are learning about pieces or parts of the topic and then putting it all together for deep learning. The adults are folding in their expertise to help students explore major ideas with various puzzle pieced put together by the whole group. This model works well for a bit more constructivist inquiry learning experiences. Note that this idea is more robust that usual Google Classroom online lists of assignments to be done by the students content management systems such as Canvas where directive teaching is considered the norm. Here is the link to the KBC Umbrella question Modeled tutorial: https://sites.google.com/view/knowledgebuildingcenterkbcguid/home

The Design Creation Model

This Knowledge Building Center template concentrates on the creation of a learning experience focused on design thinking. Here, a specialist and a classroom teacher become mentors as students follow the steps of design thinking to invent, solve, create, and develop new systems. The link to this tutorial is at: https://sites.google.com/view/umbrellacreation/home

Deep Inquiry Learning

Books by Loertscher, David V., Carol Koechlin and Sandi Zwan: Beyond Bird Units and The Big Think. Learning Commons Press (LMCSource.com) describe 18 different think model units that go well beyond surface learning as classroom teachers and teacher librarians partner to do inquiry with their students. And, the Big Think book matches those learning experiences with metacognitive strategies that reflect the learning experience just completed. Like watching the video of the basketball game, the adults and the students (players) look for what went right and what went wrong and whate we can all do better the next time.

Deep Design Learning

Book: Portnoy, Lindsay. Designed to Learn: Using Design Thinking to Bring Purpose and Passion to the Classroom. ASCD, 2020

We find here a full description for classroom teachers and other specialists how to put students in charge of their own learning.

The Evidence

The above two tutorials presume that in the school-wide learning commons, a lot of partnering is going on between the cadre of the Learning Commons and the classroom teachers. The idea is that two heads are better than one. Pairs of librarians and classroom teachers, art teachers and classroom teachers, counselors and classroom teachers can combine their expertise to create, teach and assess a learning experience far better than if they taught alone in the classroom. Each cotaught learning experience becomes a micro case study where success is measured by the percentage to students who meet or exceed both adults' expectations. By archiving such experiences and micro events, we want to look across such experiences to look at patterns in impact across the school. The idea is that the higher the number of partnered experience that school-wide assessments will be affected positively and will reflect a change in the learning culture of the entire school. Two research studies are recommended to give you an idea of data you can collect in your own school.

Loetscher collaobration research article.pdf

First Loertscher Study

Wondering if two heads really are better than one, Loertscher explored cotaught units of instructions in 12 schools. He discovered that 20-50% of students meet or exceed both adults' expectations as compared with just 50% success while teaching alone.. You can download and read the article at the left. Try this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I54pCM74cqZOGe1X1f3ZyB7kCfquaslF/view?usp=sharing

Coteacing Replication TL Article copy.pdf

Second Loertscher Study

This replication of the first study reports micro documentation of a large group of individual cotaught learning experiences by the classroom teacher and the teacher librarian. It is a sample of what you can do in your school to document unit by unit that is cotaught looking for the percentage of students who meet or exceed both adults' expectations. In this replication, what teachers teach alone in the classroom, about half of the students succeed; however, when coteaching happens, 70-100% of the students meet or exceed expectations. Is that a pattern in your school? You can download and read the document at the left.

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