The advantages of teachers and administrators collaborating are numerous and include creating shared educational goals, developing a community sense of belonging and increasing student success. At the international level, it requires increased and more focused collaborative international strategies. The importance of interpersonal interaction has led to some primary schools requesting teaching assistance from pupils’ family members to a greater degree than the requests that have typically been made by secondary schools. A promising proposal for the kind of collaboration needed for schools is offered in a new initiative by the RSA. Fruitful co-operation between the members of a community requires effective collaboration. Every day, teachers work together with their peers, school counselors, and other staff for the success of each student. Research shows that educational experiences that are active, social, contextual, engaging, and student-owned lead to deeper learning. \"Excellent work, fellas,\" Thomas says, nodding her approval. Cited in this blogpost as ‘EEF’. Collaboration means working with an individual or a group of individuals to achieve a common goal. As Laura Partridge writes in a recent article on the kind of collaboration needed to provide the long-term change and support required by schools,[7] evidence suggests that the pandemic has increased the needs for greater social and emotional support. While the traditional image of the school teacher features a lone educator working in one classroom, a more collaborative approach can increase the likelihood that students will succeed. The demands placed on schools to meet these needs were already unsustainable before Covid-19, and with the demand for additional support likely to significantly rise, ‘we need a fundamental shift towards schools being an anchor for, but not the provider of, a comprehensive range of state and community support for children’. The phrase ‘two heads are better than one’ was coined in the 16th century. The Importance of Collaboration in Teacher Professional Development. While it has historically been common for teachers to work independently, it is becoming more popular for teachers to work in teams. With many parents and carers facing unemployment, reduced income or lower job security following the crisis, there will be a rise in child poverty. Whether you are collaborating with another educator to team-teach, working hand in hand with other adults such as the school's administration or parents, or are encouraging the students themselves to learn together, collaboration in education can benefit everyone who has a stake in the school setting. There has been an increase in the number of calls made by children to Childline during lockdown and there was a 50% increase in calls to the national domestic abuse helpline during the first three weeks. By working together, schools, families, and communities can prepare for a more promising future. Schools frequently provide employment for community residents and, in some cases, offer community services. However, it has never rung truer than today. If you’re a teacher, you probably hear a lot about the benefits of teamwork and collaboration. Group projects encourage children to cooperate, improve social and interpersonal skills and help them to better understand the material at hand through discussion and a team learning effort. There is therefore a need for upgraded collaboration among instructors in the schools especially in focusing on ways of encouraging collaborative planning timeline adherence and a combined collaborative focus on differentiated learning for students with special needs (Cook & Friend, 1991). As we saw in another CIRL blogpost, videoconferencing can imitate the community of a classroom, but that imitation can only go so far. At its best, collaboration in the classroom can help students think more deeply and creatively about a subject and develop more empathy for others' perspectives. The key to strong collaboration is recognizing that a student shouldn’t be the responsibility of only one teacher, but of all teachers. When material has been taught to primary school pupils remotely, it has often been taught by parents. Sometimes it needs a little nudge. Among the many benefits of collective learning, the most important one is that it is able to fulfil the real purpose of education – nurturing responsible citizens who can collaborate with their fellow denizens to solve complex social, economic and political problems. This, in turn, can increase their learning and maximize the educational experience. Ltd. There is a greater likelihood that families in smaller and overcrowded homes without gardens have experienced conflicts at home. When teachers and parents have a relationship built on respect, trust, and the shared goal of meeting the special education needs of the parents’ very important and much-loved child, the work doesn’t have to be contentious or hard. If we publicly bad mouth our administrators, colleagues, parents or students, we are demonstrating that we don’t take the collaboration, or partnering, seriously. In fact, the 2012 Met Life Teacher Survey, painted a grim picture on teacher collaboration with more than six in ten teachers saying that time to collaborate with other teachers has decreased or stayed the same in 2012 as compared to 2011. Pupil peers have sometimes been replaced with what some primary school headteachers called ‘family hubs’ – asking a pupil’s family to be involved in the teaching and learning process, as a strategy to imitate the community learning environment provided by the classroom. In another important development in 2010, the National Education Association Foundation provided grants to create a program called Springfield Collaboration for Change, whose mission was to increase parental and community engagement in the school system. No one provider can do all of this alone. Effective collaboration also improves teacher performance. Additionally, according to the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, teaching collaboratively provides a means for the exchanging of ideas. The initiative would involve schools collaborating with a wide support network comprised of voluntary and community organisations, as well as public services. Estimations of the rate the gap will widen vary from 11 to 75%. In terms of modeling, this might be the most important. This gives further support to the need for the kind of initiative proposed by the RSA. Effective collaboration offers the means for improving education in terms of educational development, innovation, reform, research and strategy, and the sharing of resources. There is also an increased need for social and emotional support for students. On this model of collaboration, schools are placed ‘at the heart of a wider community network protecting the safety, welfare, health and wellbeing of pupils’. Communication goes hand in hand with collaboration in education especially in teaching and learning. [3] The report draws attention to the most recent systematic review of the evidence on ‘summer learning loss’,[4] which covers over a hundred years of research and estimates that in reading and language, ‘on average, summer vacations [create] a gap of about 3 months between middle- and lower-class students’. The importance of supporting and collaborating with families did not fully resonate with Joseph Michael Valente until his daughter started preschool. These are fostered not only through social spaces, but also in the classroom: a class is an intellectual and social community, and classroom environments foster intellectual and personal bonds between students and between the teacher and the class. A recent report published by the Education Endowment Foundation (‘EEF’), ‘Impact of school closures on the attainment gap’,[1] outlines global projections that ‘suggest that school closures will widen the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers, likely reversing progress made to narrow the gap since 2011’, with a median estimate indicating that the gap will widen by 36%. An active collaborative learning requires an instructor to view teaching as … A heightened focus on learning catchup should not come at the expense of greater support for students’ emotional and social needs. While this might sound like a fundamental change, it can be understood as expanding on existing forms of collaboration between schools and wider community networks. The RSA aims to fund this programme with ‘support from funding partners and forward-thinking local authorities’, which they hope will generate a fund that will be available ‘to each collaborative to invest in interventions for the pupils identified as at risk’. Primary teachers and headteachers identified the increase in parental responsibility in teaching and learning as one of the main challenges they’ve faced during school closures, in a recent CIRL online workshop on ‘challenges of remote learning in primary education’, led by Prof. Dame Alison Peacock, Chief Executive of the Chartered College of Teaching. [1] Education Endowment Foundation, ‘Impact of school closures on the attainment gap: Rapid Evidence Assessment’, 2 June 2020, p. 4. Everyday teachers are constantly working together with other teachers, school officials, and staff to ensure success for each individual student. The author is Beas Dev Ralhan,CEO & co-founder, Next Education India Pvt. Whether you’re studying times tables or applying to college, Classroom has the answers. Michigan Department of Education: Parental Engagement Information and Tools. Inspires Critical Thinking . Based on the Word Net lexical database for the English Language. [9] But the recent EEF report also suggests that schools ‘may need support in communicating effectively with parents and in helping parents understand specific ways to help their child learn’. But when you’re faced with the reality of hectic schedules, lesson plans, parent meetings, and constant time crunches, it can be tough to find time to sit down, exchange ideas with other teachers in your school, and make sure you’re on the same page. Research suggests that today’s teachers and school administrators are more interested in teacher collaboration than previous generations. Fostering effective partnerships between families and schools – for example the ‘family hubs’ set up in collaboration between some primary schools and families mentioned above – can be beneficial for pupils. July 31, 2013. [10] (The EEF recommend several strategies for primary and secondary pupils[11] and offer resources for schools to support parents during school closures.). They are watching and listening to what we say through our collegial interactions. Questions concerning what constitutes effective collaboration in education and how to best collaborate have been made more urgent by the Covid-19 crisis. The education blog. [6] It should be noted that the studies in that review are mostly of schools in the USA, where summer breaks are typically around twice as long as those in the UK. It would aim to promote a sense of ownership and responsibility across these networks for creating better futures for local children. Our students are witnessing our collaboration, or lack thereof sometimes, each and every day on our campuses and in our classrooms. [4] H. Cooper, B. Nye, K. Charlton, J. Lindsay & S. Greathouse , ‘The effects of summer vacation on achievement test scores: A narrative and meta-analytic review’, Review of Educational Research, 66(3) (1996),  pp. Collaboration is often defined as a sharing of responsibilities and resources in working to achieve mutual goals. Teacher collaboration occurs when members of a learning community work together to increase student learning and achievement. We have recently been considering the opportunities that collaboration offers for improving education after the crisis and how to implement the changes needed in collaboration in response to the pandemic, in our webinar series on Collaboration in Education after Covid-19. But collaboration does not always just happen. One important justification for collaboration is the enhanced ability to share and exchange resources. The increase in time spent online by many children puts them at higher risk of online grooming and cyberbullying. In 2004, Deborah Butler and some of her research colleagues followed 10 teachers across a two-year professional development program. One of the things to which our attention has been most drawn is the importance of community. Collaboration in its simplest, and most understandable form, is getting individuals, who may or may not have similar interests, to work together in an organized endeavor to a satisfying and most appropriate group end. Partridge writes: ‘Establishing supportive networks around schools as they open again could ensure that underlying needs are identified and responded to before they manifest in behaviours that lead to educational exclusion. 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