Collaboration in 2020

The Collaborative Journey Term 1, Week 4 2020

Team collaboration

As a team, we meet every morning and most afternoons. The morning conversations allow us to assign roles during our Discovery time, allocate speakers for our daily korero, and also share current pastoral care or other student needs. We continue to plan weekly as a team also.

Partner collaboration

As well as this, my wonderful colleague Katie and I have been experimenting with different forms of collaboration throughout the learning programme. Our long term goals for collaborating are:

• To provide a varied and needs-focused learning for our students.
• To experiment using different roles, and the impact of these on student engagement, happiness and learning.
• To model & share different practises &  styles of explaining and teaching.
• To reflect, discuss and develop deeper insights around each of our students, and use this to inform our planning.

Some of our collaborative moments so far:

Maths 

* Bringing our maths classes together to teach what independent maths choosing times looks like, sounds like and feels like for our students. We have reflected each day and decided key behaviours for the sessions, including inside voices, trying new things, how to find a partner, collecting/ using/putting away materials.

* We have taken turns at leading the introduction time, and shared different games with each other and the students. The students loved Katie’s traffic light game and I will use this in future! Katie has a very clear way of explaining, which has helped me check my own explanations are also clear.

*Working together in maths has also allowed our students to build relationships across home groups.  We have supported each other on behaviour calls, e.g. when asking students to be quieter or celebrating success. Both of us roam during the session, which means more students afre receiving teacher feedback (prompting, questioning, praise).

Shared book

* We have also worked together on shared book instruction. This has allowed us to share our different knowledge about books, and model book response activities for each other.

Student wellbeing and behaviour

Working alongside each other has allowed Katie and I to notice and share students’ behaviour and wellbeing needs. We have worked together as a tag-team, to support children who are having difficulty letting parents go at the start of the day, to separate and re-partner students who are working unproductively together, to buddy students in need of friends/learning support and to double the praise and impact for students  who need extra confidence.

We will take a break from collaborating in maths and literacy next week, while we get our groups established. However, we will continue to collaborate on space use, behaviour, lunch times and other learning areas. We will look to further collaboration in subject areas after our groups are established.

29/01/20 
My collaborative journey so far...
For three years, I have worked in the collaborative space with my team, and come to know and love the ongoing conversations, learning and flexible way we plan to meet student groups. Some of the positives have been:
* Mixed ability and needs-based groups
* Planning to use our talents e.g. a skilled art teacher takes an art lesson, I've taken science tasks etc
* Shared reflection and strategies to address students' needs
* Alternative teaching e.g. phonics, social skills group in 2019
* ...and many others

Ways of teaching

• Parallel teaching 
• 1 teach, 1 observe
• 1 teach, 1 assist
• Alternative teaching - one with larger group, 1 with smaller group
• Team teaching
• Station teaching

Student needs, spaces, collaboration, routines...our next steps:

Are we using our spaces to the best effect? 

Can we collaborate in new and more effective ways? 

After team discussion...

* Naming who is leading during shared teaching time

* Coming together to do the roll and notices, using the 1 teach/1 assist model or 1 teach/1 observe with my hub buddy

* Coming together as a whole hub for singing etc, and perhaps using different spaces e.g. learning pathway

* Come together each morning to discuss what is working / not working for our learners, and how we can adjust the use of space, collaborative styles, plans or timetables accordingly. Key questions: 

How and why are we using this space, and is it allowing for the most effective learning? 

How might different use of space and types of learning change the way we timetable?