A-Z of Education Today: Collaboration and Cooperation

A friend of mine has been posting her A-Z of the medical field on Facebook recently, and the more I read her highly humorous, often facetious posts, I became inspired to create my own A-Z of Education. I know that most people are aware of what alphabetical order means, but I feel the need to clarify that these posts are NOT in order of importance, and the opinions expressed here are strictly my own.

Well, I had originally planned for "C" to be about change because it's one of the hardest thing for educators to handle, even though it's the only constant thing we have to look forward to.  After last night's #ncadmin chat on Twitter, however, I knew I had to talk about collaboration and cooperation, just like I HAD to talk about behavior.  

So, again I feel like I have to give a definition because it's been my observation that we say one thing, mean something else, and then expect the students to act differently from us when they are doing the same given activity.  Let me first talk about the expectation for students:

Cooperation: Working together to complete an activity/project that is too big or too complex for one person in the given period of time.  A process of learning WITH each other, as each student learns something from their part in the process, parts are shared with group, all pieces are put together in an organized fashion, and all benefit from the completion of the task.  Examples: Jigsaw reading, traditional group projects/presentations  Non-examples: one student read passage aloud, so all can say they've read; Split up homework questions and all copy tomorrow to hand in individual sheets

Collaboration: Working and learning FROM each other in order to create something new or solve a complex problem with multiple possible solutions.  Each student's perspective is appreciated and sought after as product is designed and created and/or problem is analyzed and solved.  Examples: Problem-based learning, group story writing  Non-Examples: one student make the plan and divide up work; group working to answer a practice problem with one known solution

I start with the students because 1) I'll always be a teacher and 2) we tend to be able to more clearly identify what we expect from students.  What does it mean for us, though?  How do we define the ways in which we learn from each other?  Does simply sitting in the same room for 45 minutes (60, 90, 120) and calling it a PLC (Professional Learning Community) or LTM (Learning Team Meeting) mean that we've actually "cooperatively learned" anything from each other?  Does dividing up the lesson plans to be done by core subject (in elementary) or day (in secondary) mean that we've "collaboratively" planned?  If we want students to learn during their time together and through their shared experiences, do we not want the same for ourselves if we're using the same words to define what we say we're doing?

Now I know it's not easy, and I know there is not a lot of time.  We do, however, expect it of our students as required skills to practice, and most of us agree with the benefits of learning/practicing those skills to the "real world".  Isn't what we do as professionals our "real world"?  Don't students benefit most from our modeling of the skills and behaviors (in case you missed it, here are my thoughts on behavior modeling) we want them to demonstrate? Has anyone noticed that I LOVE rhetorical questions? Ok, don't answer that.  I really don't want anyone to think that I'm speaking rhetorically or completely cynical because I'm not.  Everything I write about is something I have probably done or taken part in and learned from while in the classroom, or it's something I've observed since working more directly with teacher groups outside of the classroom.  I hate to see us get bogged and beaten down by things that 1) out of our control, 2) our reactions to things out of our control, or 3) our own inconsistencies.  My grandmother used to say "Work smarter, not harder, but WORK!" I'm saying, let's not fight against what we claim to believe in because we're making it harder on ourselves.  True collaboration and cooperation amongst teacher teams (PLCs, LTMs, Grade Levels, etc) help us do what my grandmother preached while keeping us entrenched in our focus, learning.  

So, I want to share an example of how time-saving, learning-focused, collaborative planning could look.  I'll preface this with knowledge that the idea came from a collaborative discussion in an LTM I was facilitating last year with a group of 2nd grade teachers who were feeling bogged down by the number of times they had to meet, the requirement for lesson plans to be turned in nearly a week ahead of time, and the admonishment they'd received for their "shared" plans (you know, the ones where one person does math, one science, etc, and they all get copies of compliance-based plans that meet the needs of NO students).  They had just had Learning Focused training, which expects the use of Essential Questions (EQs), but that was bogging them down more, as they were used to learning objectives and "I can" statements.  Needless to say, they were looking for ways to find time to process this new learning and complete all of the assigned tasks, so they asked for time to "collaboratively" plan during our meeting time. Rather than say "Um, no", which is what I was thinking, much like I thought when students would ask if they could do someone else's homework in my class, I said "how about we look at how what we do in here, in terms of standard-based instruction, ties into what you have to do, and come up with a plan to streamline your individual planning process by making your collaboration efficient and effective.  Here is the collaboration piece, as that's the point of this whole blog, right...

1. Begin with the standard(s) to be taught as a unit. (We are all teaching to standards, right?)
2. Make sure that EVERY member of the group understands the standard.
• What are the key components students must know, understand, and be able to do.
• List these things so everyone can see them (We're learning from each other and getting on the same page, right?)
• If someone throws out a teaching strategy or formative assessment idea for one of the components, write it down! (Work smarter, not harder...don't try and come up with all new ideas when you're later planning alone)
3. Determine the big picture understanding based on what we all now know of the standard.
• What is the overall learning target of this standard? (Read this article!)
• This target, in the form of a long "I can" statement, learning target, or EQ, becomes the basis for your common assessment of the standard.
• If someone comes up with an assessment question/product/idea, write it down! (It can be fleshed out and finalized later, but it will probably be forgotten if it's not written down, and then we'll be spinning our wheels trying to come up with one.)
4. All of those key components we listed earlier, let's categorize them into key concepts for connected learning.
5. Let's prioritize these concept into an instructional flow that builds upon itself for optimal learning.
6. Now for each prioritized concept, let's write some lesson objectives (EQs, I-can statements) to be sure we are teaching all of those components we put in each category.
• Remember that each statement represents a lesson, so the plan for your unit is connected to the number of lessons (NOT days).
• If someone throws out a formative assessment idea for any of the lessons, write it down!
7. Let's write at least one formative assessment prompt for each lesson.
8. Let's write our unit (standard) common assessment.
9. Let's go forth and write our individualized lesson plans tailored to the needs of our students.
• We already know the lesson is aligned to the standard.
• We know our team is teaching on the same concepts.
• We know at least one way we're going to formatively assess.
• We know how we will assess the unit/standard as a whole.
• We already have some instructional strategies that were shared during our "learning" process

1-6 can easily be done in 30-45 minutes if everyone is focused and willing to share their knowledge.  A team of all brand new teachers (Please don't do this admin!) may take a little longer, as they may need longer to understand the standard, but for the most part, the learning and the team collaboration can happen in 30-45 minutes.  Once proficient in the process, or with smaller units/standards, 7 & 8 can also happen in that same 30-45 minutes.  If not, the team has already shared out some ideas for formative assessments, and the culminating assessment can be fleshed out later.

By the way, Steps 1-3, 5, 7 & 8 were things we were already doing in our LTM, but they hadn't made the connection.  They're probably things you're already doing in some form in your PLCs but don't necessarily realize it.

Did this plan magically make this group of teachers "better"? It made them better planners for learning.  It made them better collaborators and a stronger Learning Team.  I didn't get to observe their classrooms, so whether or not it made their teaching better is not for me to say, but I can say that it made them all feel better about the process.  They felt like they were learning from each other.  The ones who used to go back and basically rewrite the plans that had been shared with them felt like they weren't doing double work.  They felt empowered in one little aspect of our world of education.  I don't know if they are continuing with this plan this year, as I'm no longer at the school, but I do know they were a more effective and determined team for the rest of the year after it was developed.

As a final note about collaboration on teams...Please, please, please, don't think that your new teachers, especially if you're the only "veteran" on your team, have nothing to contribute because they've never done this before.  We ALL have something to learn, but we often intimidate our new teachers into thinking they shouldn't share because they don't yet "know".  You'd be surprised sometimes at what they DO know, and you'd also be surprised how hard it is for them to learn from you if they're intimidated by you.