Inquiry into our collaborative practice - Reflection

Towards the end of term 2 Sharon and I started our inquiry into our own teaching practice looking at our hypothesis on what does effective collaboration look like? The strategies we have used for this was a peer observation where we had a colleague come and spend a morning observing the collaboration happening across the learning space and give us feedback and take pictures to show us objectively what the room looked like during learning time. We also looked at our planning time together. Sharon and I work in a modern learning environment with two classes, we do our long and short term planning together. During Term 2 holidays we started our planning for term 3 we took photos and used the strategy of stop-think-reflect to consider how we were collaborating and if we thought the planning session was successful.

Devs came to observe one of our lessons together which was fantastic as she is also looking at collaboration for her inquiry. During the time she was with us she gave us some great feedback on our strengths making comments about how we used the space effectively and worked well with our teacher aids who knew the programme well and could successfully take small groups with the lesson knowledge and confidence to work as the lead on small groups. She took the below photo as she could see that there were 3 teachers working in a close space with their own groups on different and appropriate activities. From our reading on co teaching we know this is station teaching. We also used alternative teaching where 1 staff member worked with a large group and other staff members worked with small groups. The lead teacher in this session was also a teacher aid who takes the class for music.

An area for development that Devs pointed out was how we use our voices when we are all running station groups. We need to be mindful of how loud we are and the pitch in our voices as it could cause distraction for others learning close by. We will also look at ensuring our teacher aids move around into different learning spaces so that they are not always teaching at the same station. This is something we are going to adapt in our planning and will have another observation later into the term to see if there is progress in these areas.

During the holidays Sharon and I had this photo taken of us working together on our long term planning. We were very mindful that session on how we collaborated and how we shared responsibility when it came to planning. We would start a session, stop, think and reflect on how we were working together. Sharon and I have started working our long term planning into more detail so that there is a weekly plan and learning intention for each session so our weekly planning is simplified and takes less time. When collaborating you need to find ways of working smarter as you have to fit into each other's schedule.

Through this planning session  our apparent strengths were: 

• Brainstorm together to make links across the curriculum and key competencies 
• Link to each others students so that we can benefit all learners
• Set targets of what we want to achieve by a certain time to keep us motivated and on track
• Delegate well, finding and making resources, each work on a different curriculum area and then share together.
• Both enjoy working with other staff members to share ideas, planning and learn from others. 

Ares for development:

• Both are very excitable and can distract each other with new ideas and end up going down resource rabbit holes. 
• Are we overloading our timetable? Both of us are keen on extending our own knowledge and will often come to planning meetings with new concepts and interventions to try which may result in us removing other successful aspects of the timetable from previous terms.   
• Have more opportunity for more student input and reflection so student voice is visible in our planning. 

We now have areas to improve our practice on effective collaboration. This will be our focus for term 3.