Teacher collaboration supports student collaboration

In his book, Embedded Formative Assessment, Dylan Wiliams devotes an entire chapter to “Activating learners as instructional resources for one another.” How does student collaboration mirror or compare to teacher collaboration? How can one practice support the other practice?

There are multiple reasons why good teacher collaboration can be powerful. One reason that might be overlooked sometimes for teachers to collaborate is so that they can work through and experience how to effectively collaborate themselves as a team and in that process help students do the same. It can be hard to get someone else to do something that they have not experienced themselves. Even if they have experienced good collaboration or group work it is important for it to be an ongoing thing still fresh in the mind. When I struggle with team/group norms and structures it helps me to think about how students might struggle with team norms and structures thus helping me to have a better understanding of how to better support them. Many norms, protocols, and structures for adult collaboration and group work also work well for students and vice versa. I also, think that for students to truly treat each other and be treated by adults as sense makers it’s important for adults to treat each other as sense makers. Being a teacher allows the duality of both supporting good group work in the classroom from outside a group and also supporting good group from within a group when working within the rest of the department.

I think just about every teacher has heard that it is good to have students work together in group work. Yet many teachers find that putting their students together in groups often leads to students copying off the quickest and fastest student in the group or just having off topic conversations. There are many aspects to what supports good group work and reasons why student group work is powerful. In fact I am currently reading a book about it called Strength in Numbers: Collaborative Learning in Secondary Mathematics by Llana Horn. With a friend and colleague we are facilitating an online book discussion around it to help each other understand it better. All of this can be better understood if the teacher can think about group work both within and outside group collaboration.

Teachers might also be asked to collaborate as a department or across grade bands. This can be to create unity and cohesion in how students are taught. It can be for cross curriculum work. This can also be so that teachers can actually look at each others work and their students work and problem solve so that they can better meet the needs of their own students. It can help to have an outside perspective on things. Also, it can be fun and even become like a game where everyone is in it together to make education the best they can and problem solve together like detectives sleuthing out the answers on how to right what is not going well.