Collaborative Teaching: Enhancing Interactivity & Engagement - Essay Sample

Introduction

Collaborators coming together is a new development to change the traditional move of teachers to engage students in more solitary teaching, which is being discouraged, as the school management seeks to enhance interactive sessions, where there are a learning and teaching experience for both students and teachers. Collaborative teaching has been observed to improve the teaching methods among schools and improved scores among the students.

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It has enabled the teachers to function together and employ a reflective practice whereby teachers evaluate their teaching methods, and techniques, analyze them and come up with more ways to improve on that, based on individual classrooms and problems specific to them. The move has enabled collaborators to notice and identify the weaknesses within the classroom, which is an integral part of this process whose main solution is to develop strategies that ensure that the struggling students do not feel left out.

It has led to teachers developing the need to evaluate themselves with an aim of bettering their teaching by understanding their background interests and passions, motivations and experiences as educators (Clausen, Aquino, & Wideman, 2009). With this, they formulate working groups to discuss their students' performances thus boosting their goal of learning for all. Sharing of power among teachers and taking critics positively from fellow colleagues encourages creativity and devising more improved methods of content delivery.

For instance, at Boones Mill Elementary school, the management has formulated groups of five teachers. The teachers are bound to notice important knowledge and skills amongst their students, and what they ought to learn. The teachers come up with common continuous assessments that gauge the performance of the students on a weekly basis. Working in teams ensures the teachers discuss the clarity of results and hence can assess and conduct a detailed analysis of the results. They are able to spot and build on the strengths and weaknesses of their respective students and thus have an idea of which method is operational or not.

Every new development comes with areas that need improving in the future. It has been observed that teachers around many schools opt to work on a solitary basis. Teachers should stop viewing teaching as an individual task and embrace teamwork. They should stop the tendency of finding experts from elsewhere to solve their problems, instead work out solutions themselves. The other area that needs addressing is when the school management makes excuses for collaborations that have failed in one way or the other.

There might be other cases surrounding the result-oriented institutions, where the DRIP syndrome does not affect the teachers. They are rich in data and information and the only problem that may arise is the failure of a teacher to utilize the data at his/her disposal. They should be able to maximize the availability of this information (Barth, 1991). Teachers should aim at avoiding hierarchical recognitions of who knows more than the other does instead create the need for everyone to contribute and share ideas of what is helpful and important to both the students and the collaborators.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the educators ought to begin using the data of students they have as variable to indicate progress and improvement. Collaborators should stop working alone and keeping ideas and materials to themselves. This poor strategy greatly discourages improvement in quality delivery as well as value for results attained by students. It is recommended that the entire staff of a school should start to work together and set common goals and traditions and focus on achieving them.

References

Barth, R. S. (1991). Restructuring Schools: Some Questions for Teachers and Principals. Phi Delta Kappan, 73(2), 123-28.

Clausen, K. W., Aquino, A. M., & Wideman, R. (2009). Bridging the real and ideal: A comparison between learning community characteristics and a school-based case study. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25(3), 444-452.