Collaborative teaching and learning in Flexible learning spaces.

On Thursday afternoon we were fortunate enough to attend a session about collaborative teaching and learning spaces with Neill O'Reilly, the principal of Waitakiri School . Although the time we attended was in school holidays and our team had spent the morning sorting work for the new term the timing was spot on for me personally. Had I attended this session earlier I may have been overwhelmed or unsure, however following a term working in an open spaced collaborative environment and following many trialed strategies for working in this way it proved to be a wonderful time to attend. It was also beneficial to attend with colleagues so we could share our thoughts of where we are at on our journey.

When we work together in a smarter manner with student focus as our priority I believe that we can achieve significant differences and improve the quality of our practice....however, this is a process that is met with many challenges. I believe it is achieved with lots of discussion and careful planning and educators who are able to work alongside each other supporting, challenging and nurturing each other. Research affirms the practice of teacher collaboration and encourages us to work in ways that make differences to learners...this requires careful focus and can be time consuming. There are many benefits of working in this way including: educators learning from each other and benefiting from alternative perspectives, supporting each other when dealing with challenging behaviours, shared planning to better meet the needs of students, arranging learners into needs based groups, providing students with multiple perspectives of the curriculum through interactions with various educators, shared beliefs which enable consistent messages.

A significant aspect of collaboration is the nature of pedagogy. The importance of shared understandings of what quality teaching and learning looks like as well as how it feels and even sounds! I think this is an aspect we can develop at all times and could be an ongoing focus of discussion between all teachers in our school.... as Together Everyone Achieves More. School wide structures and strategies to support each other are important. Adding to this the importance of a growth mindset and how at times a fixed mindset can inhibit growth.

The norms of collaboration referred to were pause, paraphrase, posing questions, putting ideas on the table and taking them off, providing data, paying attention to self, others and the agenda and presuming positive intentions...with communication being paramount.Some other points of significance discussed were: picking a co-teaching strategy as a team and focusing on it; being explicit so the strategy becomes implicit. the term M.A.T.E: referring to mutually agreed team expectations; developing strategies together to benefit target groups; the manner in which we feed back to students (process verses product); the importance of popping the word yet at the end of a statement ( acknowledging that we're not there yet); establishing must do's and can do's that cause learning; ensuring the role of the learning coach is not a rover or roamer!

Many aspects of what we do in our team were affirmed through discussions we had. One of these discussions related to goal setting and reflections. Something we were presented with was the idea of educators sharing their goals students and the students being able to witness and comment on our developments....this could prove to be something interesting to try in the new term. At this point I feel fortunate to have experienced the journey with our team in terms of collaborating and excited that we are on track as we journey into a new term with a phenomenal amount of work yet to do!