Collaborative Planning

In my previous blog posts, I shared my team's journey from individual classes' online learning spaces and programmes toward collaborative planning, teaching and learning across the syndicate. During the Hybrid learning period, we created our team's Hybrid Learning Site that helped us address our home and in-class diverse students' needs. Surprisingly, we all enjoyed this approach for a number of reasons and decided to continue with our collaboration in Term 2.

I believe that my team's collaboration is not a task to complete then move on, it will be an ever-changing, ongoing process that will involve a lot of sharing, experimenting, designing, reflecting, etc.  I noticed that when we are co-planning and co-teaching, we develop and establish shared values and commitments which in turn help unify and unite our team.

I appreciate that all strong collaborative cultures develop over time and require a lot of team effort and commitment to the process. My Team and I are at the beginning of our journey and we look forward to growing into a genuinely collaborative team in order to increase student achievement and advance our own professional skills and knowledge.

The Team's Learning Site is one of the first pieces of evidence of our productive collaboration. We are getting to know the teaching and learning styles, needs, interests, fears and hopes of each team member and this helps to shape the norms for how the team engages in the shared work.

Developing Team Trust during Team Teaching

"Active collaboration is particularly important for creating a growth-based learning environment and for increasing student learning progress. Research shows that teachers who work together and learn from each other are more successful in improving student outcomes than those who work alone." Through growth to achievement: Report of the review to achieve educational excellence in Australian schools, (March 2018)

I completely agree that working together helps to learn from each other in a seamless and practical way, right there at the right moment in time and this makes this learning more successful. What I've noticed is that team teaching also improves trust among the teachers. 

Another important aspect that team teaching brings to the plate is reflecting on the lesson plan. You are not planning just for yourself, you're planning for the team and this adds more responsibility and effort that each team member puts into their planning and... delivery. 

We noticed that our learners benefit from our collaborative teaching because we take collective responsibility for all learners, and we are consistent in our curriculum and experience delivery across the syndicate. We also observed that we (team teachers) model skills of collaboration to our learners.