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Tag: Collaboration

Team Wellness: Soft Skills of Collaboration (Guest Post)

May 16, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Guest Post: Tan Huynh- EAL Teacher at Saigon South International School  Blog | Twitter: @TanELLclassroom

I think of a team as a system of moving parts like gears in a machine.  They all work together so that the machine can function. The soft skills are the lubricates used to help keep things moving along smoothly and with less friction.  Friction can potentially cause team members to shy away from collaborating, which ultimately impacts students’ growth.

I use the acronym JCAP to encapsulate four essential soft skills of collaboration.

Judgmental language

We are entitled to our opinions and having different opinions. This is healthy to grow and expand the thinking of a team. However, we must be mindful of when our opinions turn into criticism. Teaching is deeply personal, and many teachers attach their identities and self-worth to their profession.  When we speak in judgemental ways, we trigger a fight response from others, a defense from some, and an emotionally walling off from others.

I use the CLIMB acronym to avoid highly-charged language.  Judgemental language often contains words and phrases such as:

  • Change: Let’s change how we …
  • Less: A less boring approach is…
  • Improve: We can improve this by…
  • More: It’s more effective to….
  • Better: A better idea is to…

Acknowledge  

In addition to avoiding judgemental language, we need to acknowledge our team members at every opportunity.  By doing this, we make emotional deposits to our relationships. Think about the health of a relationship like a bank balance.  In a relationship, every interaction is a deposit or a withdraw. However, not all interactions are equal in denomination. Positive, affirming interactions have less impact than a negative, critical one.  The goal is to have many more positive interactions than the negative ones. Negative interactions can deplete emotional deposits from a relationship much faster than uplifting ones.

Here are some opportunities when we can acknowledge our colleagues:

  • Praise a colleague for a meaningful contribution during a meeting
  • Acknowledge how the colleague’s strength added to the success of the project
  • Recognize when a colleague did something that was in their stretch zone
  • Compliment a colleague when they skillfully dealt with an issue
  • Describe what you learned from observe their work or interactions with others
  • Thank them for supporting you in completing a task

There are countless ways we can recognize our colleagues.  We just have to train our eyes to see and our hearts to share when these opportunities arise. Teachers are encouraged to have a laser focus on the positive qualities of their peers rather than be blinded by the differences.

Personalizing issues

Sometimes our negative interactions and judgmental language can cause us to take things personally.  We need to be mindful of the moments when we are taking things personally. Attaching to an idea or personalizing a topic closes doors of opportunities to take the curriculum in a different direction or to expand our practice.

Your passion for a particular topic or process will motivate and engage your students.  The downside is that when suggestions are offered to our pet projects, we can become defensive.  As we fight to defend our passions, we might inadvertently build barriers to collaboration because our colleague’s ideas are met with resistance at best and hostility at worst.

Signs of taking things personally can include phrases such as:

  • That is the way we’ve always done it! (TTWWADI)
  • Why do we have to change it?
  • What’s so bad about what we have?
  • You just don’t see the value in this.

If we do not develop these soft skills, we will have a hard time collaborating effectively with others.  Every team has a culture, and these soft skills nourish the soul of the team to have positive, affirming, and effective collaboration.

Student Collaboration Skills: Follow Up Resources

June 6, 2017 / / 0 Comments

I received a timely email from the folks at the University of Wisconsin- Stout listing resources for Making Group Projects Work. This ties to my post on how to structure virtual group projects with the scaffolding needed to make the collaboration work for all group members.

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Student Collaboration Skills: From F2F to Virtual (and teachers too)

May 29, 2017 / / 0 Comments

How are we taking what we teach our students about 

face-to-face collaboration to carry over to their group work done virtually? Teaching students working in groups about setting roles, expectations, and norms, along with communicating clear assessment criteria for individuals and the group, is invaluable for project collaboration and life as we skill students how to work in teams. One can ask the same question about teachers as some teaching teams are moving into virtual collaboration.

So why do I bring this topic up? In the past month, one of my sons shared about a group project he was working on in college. I asked about guidelines, expectations, and rubrics for teamwork and the final project, along with possible lessons on collaboration, especially as most of the work would be done virtually. My son shared that nothing was offered, so he was stepping in to use some of his organizational skills learned from his side job and from his being president of a student organization.

A second occasion was in speaking to some friends from our days in Asia. They shared about an incredible program their daughter experienced to teach her to become a mediator and facilitator of discussions at a conference for youth from a border region where refugees were crossing to find safety and a better future. They noted that the year-long training equipped their daughter for collaboration and group work, while her regular school group virtual projects had no scaffolding. They noted that sometimes, with her virtual group projects, teachers needed to teach communication skills, help set roles, or offer clear expectations. This, at times, led to the domination of the groups by some students, while others wishing to contribute did not speak as they pulled back from participation.

For teachers and collaboration, I remember my time in the early 90s at the Saudi Arabian International School-Riyadh when we went from junior high to middle school. The administrators provided excellent guidance and training for the transition process. The training included learning how the new grade-level teams would operate most effectively by developing structures and processes. While we were not working together virtually (no Internet allowed in Saudi Arabia then), I learned a great deal as a counselor working with and watching the teams learn and grow together, especially with their communication skills. Those experiences would lay the groundwork for articles on curriculum collaboration:

As a big believer in blended-to-virtual learning that includes virtual collaboration, I hope educators take their lessons and frameworks for student in-class teamwork and adapt them to our students’ digital workspaces. The same can be said of our teaching teams, along with training in how to use the technology of the digital work areas as curriculum mapping tools, LMSs, and collaboration tools via Google Docs and maybe even carryovers from the business world like Slack.

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Connecting Personal Learning Systems to Goals, Autonomy & Portfolios

May 14, 2016 / / 0 Comments

PLS

We know that so much of learning is about making connections. 

This goes not just for students but also for teachers. Fortunately, I work with dynamic teachers who enjoy sharing and building off one another’s ideas.

Case in point, I emailed the Personal Learning System (PLS) page of Web Resources for Learning to Jessa Veneman, who teaches Sixth Graders at my school. Jessa responded with the following.

“One of my goals is to create a more autonomous classroom where kids become more aware of their needs, strengths, and learning styles so that they can be more responsible for their own learning.” We then spoke in person, bouncing some more ideas around. This led me to add the following to the Personal Learning System page.

As one colleague pointed out, working with students to construct their Personal Learning System goes hand in hand with furthering their self-understanding, developing their learner profile, and supporting their learning autonomy while moving them to be goal-oriented. The components of one’s PLS (see below) come together, supporting this idea of self-directed learners as we have them use tools to reflect (blog), create (multiple tools), set goals, and document their understanding and goal attainment through their portfolios.

Thanks, Jessa, for helping me make further connections!

Supporting Resources:

Blog Posts> https://lessonslearned.edublogs.org/tag/personal-learning-system/

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Tech Titans: Shari- Communication & Collaboration

December 6, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Shari

The following information comes from the FCPS page listing information about Shari, the Tech Titan, who represents the NETS Communication and Collaboration standard. My comments are at the end of each passage.

Unique Traits

The swirl of communication and collaboration never stops with Shari! She loves learning with others both in school and outside of school.  Shari uses technology tools to make communicating and collaborating easier.

My Take: These characters represented in posters displayed in schools throughout the county are aimed to engage students to think about their use of technology and information. Thus the language fits well for our younger students. I wonder if there are plans to differentiate the representations for our Middle and High School students as the program moves forward. I think even with our older students that the Manga style art can bring in high schoolers to offer their take on ways they communicate and collaborate. One can definitely see the Tech Titans Web pages expanding to include examples of student work and their interpretations.

Special Skills

Shari not only loves to share her discoveries, she is also very curious to learn about what others think and values opportunities to learn from others.  She asks great questions, is a good listener, and enjoys the collaborative process.  She has an interest in understanding other cultures, so she engages with a variety of people within her school, the community, and even around the world!

My Take: I really like the highlighting of being good listeners to also ask good and hopefully expansive questions when appropriate. Being citizens connected to their local and greater world community is key as this standard so nicely guides students to use their social skills often supported by technology as noted in the Digital Tools section below.

Digital Tools

Shari uses a variety of collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, discussion boards, email, and web conferencing.

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Your Teaching and Learning Team

December 22, 2011 / / 0 Comments

How is your student support team organized? Who is on the team? Are you providing mainly pullout, pull-in, or build-in services? How is your professional development system connected to this team and its mission? There are many questions to ask when we step back and think about the best way to provide reinforcement, enrichment, and an overall differentiated learning environment for our students.

Over the past few years, I have focused on building a systematic approach to developing a curriculum. One aspect of this approach is forming a team approach to build out units of study that incorporate ICL integration, differentiation of instruction and assessment, meeting school-wide goals, etc. Efforts by our learning support team at Alexandria Country Day School and a recent article in the Davidson Journal (Davidson College in NC) reminded me that we should also look at systems supporting student learning outside the curriculum review process.

I remember the early 1990s at the American International School-Riyadh when we developed a student support system for the middle school. The team members included all the teachers, an administrator, the counselor, and the learning support teachers. We created the structure of common meeting times for the two teams at each grade level. One day a week, we discussed individual student learning needs, while on another day, the focus was on the curriculum. We used technology to record learning plans, goals, and results in the student information system. However, the librarian was absent in the meetings while the technology teacher visited to share his lessons and not so much as a collaborator in the curriculum process.

We were ahead of the curve in many ways but failed to make the connection between needing to bring more specialists on board for the curriculum and, just as importantly, for the learning support. The technology teachers and the librarians could have collaborated in both areas to make a difference for our students.

Returning to today, the article from the Davidson Journal explains how the college recently brought different groups of learning support teams together under one roof– the library. As so many of us write about, the library/media center/learning community should be at the center of one’s school/campus. It makes total sense to bring your technology specialists and your other learning support teachers into the library. It also makes sense to have your instructional technologist and teacher librarian as members of your learning support team when creating a curriculum review system and as partners in grade level/department meetings when creating learning support strategies.

An additional item to note is that this team is naturally skilled with “building in” learning support strategies to be added to the units in your curriculum mapping tool. By documenting strategies in your curriculum system to support struggling and students needing enrichment, you move away from the old “pullout” support model. 

I learned from Dr. Mary Landrum and my wife’s expertise as a GATE coordinator that the more we can collaborate with teachers to develop learning activities and assessments together, the more that they can pull learning strategies off “the shelf” of the curriculum tool to support students without calling for them to be pulled out of their classes. While Dr. Landrum teaches mainly about providing instruction for gifted students, her book Consultation in Gifted Education: Teachers Working Together to Serve Students provides a collaboration model that can be used to meet the whole spectrum of student needs.

And back to how your professional development program is run, one hopes for teacher involvement in choosing topics and the teaching and learning team adding their insights. This team’s engagement puts them in an excellent position to assess the instructional needs across the school. 

I am rambling here, but if you are interested in learning more about Davidson’s new program, I wrote a post for my school’s blog about the Davidson article and how our school was following the same model. Here is that post>

___________________________

Davidson College is known as a very academic liberal arts college that is dedicated to supporting the craft of teaching by its professors. Davidson’s professors do research and write articles and books, but their primary focus is on teaching. To support their efforts, as part of the strategic plan, Davidson opened its Center for Teacher and Learning (CTL) in the school library in August.

The connection to Alexandria Country Day School is that we also opened our Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) in August. What is striking in reading an article from the Fall 2011 Davidson Journal is how similar the two programs are. It demonstrates the forward-thinking and student-centered nature of our administrators and TLC staff when we mirror the program of a college such as Davidson.

Central to the work of our TLC team members is the focus on collaboration with the classroom teachers. This partnership, looking at how best to reach learning goals and meet individual student needs, drives how the TLC teachers help design instruction and provide one-to-one support for our students.

An additional part of this “collaboration team” approach to supporting teaching and learning is the involvement of our instructional technologist, teacher librarian, and director of technology. As part of the iPad pilot program, the fifth-grade teachers worked with our technology and library team members over the summer to review and adapt the fifth-grade curriculum to further support the students in attaining skills for the 21st century. The curriculum was further adapted to meet the information, media, and visual literacy standards supported by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) and the technology literacies published as the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for students. Members of the TLC will join the collaboration team in January as they review the sixth-grade curriculum in preparation for next year and the continued roll “forward” of the iPad Pilot program.

The Davidson Journal article describes the same team effort of the Center for Teaching and Learning – “(the CTL)…brings together these centers- along with the instructional technologists and information literacy librarians- to help students take a comprehensive approach to strengthening academic skills. The CTL also advises faculty who want to experiment with new teaching tools and to discuss different approaches to teaching.”

Davidson College is in good company with its pioneering efforts. 🙂

 

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Collaboration and Progressive Education

October 2, 2008 / / 0 Comments

I recently posted How Progressive is Your School? to highlight our school’s effort to measure just how progressive we are. The discussion centered upon the article by Alfie Cohen and the 8 values (Intrinsic Motivation, Social Justice, Collaboration, Whole Child, Community, Deep Understanding, Active Learning & Taking Kids Seriously) that encompass being more progressive in how we “do” school. I am now doing a series of posts about our learning community’s ideas about each value. We are now discussing one value per month and looking at ways to follow through in making the value even more a part of our culture at HIS.

  • One room school house
  • Where are we in our interdisciplinary efforts?
  • Learning how to collaborate, learning to work and play together. Teach cooperative learning skills as part of 21st century skill set.
  • How do we build a truly democratic school?
  • What role does the Student Representative Council play in our community decision-making?
  • How effective is group work in our classrooms? Which kinds of group projects more effective?
  • Which Web 2.0 tools meet our collaboration needs?
  • While we have the structure and culture for collaboration, how well are we doing?, How can we measure our efforts?
  • How to expand the collaboration to our immediate and world community?
  • Role of administration in all aspects of collaboration?
  • Our culture supports mixing of seniors with younger students.
  • Continue to develop older students as peer leaders with attentive listening and group facilitation skills
  • What structures do we have and need to support collaboration in our community? How to build further partnerships?
  • How to engage parents in the culture of our school?

The Big Picture: How to Create a Collaborative and Systematic Process for Curriculum Development and Review

September 24, 2008 / / 0 Comments

What a mouthful for a post title. 

I have spent my years as an instructional technologist working through the curriculum development and review process to help shift my schools toward becoming what we call School 2.0. We constructed a workable system at my last school that made a difference in how and what we taught in our classrooms.

We are now developing a curriculum development system at my current school that will involve working with our school culture and unique needs. Hsinchu International School is very different than the huge school I worked at before. We will use questions around specific categories to help us through this creation process. The questions come from a workshop I developed to help guide school communities to either refine their current curriculum review system or start a new one. I will be sharing these categories and questions in a series of posts.

This is the first one, covering the big picture when school-wide leaders come together to start the conversation.

1) What would be an effective way to manage school-wide subject area meetings to review the standards/benchmarks for scope/sequencing (i.e., facilitation, time of year, one or several meetings by division, etc.)?

2) How do discussions take place about the big picture and developing ownership of the curriculum?

3) Who oversees this process of creating this process?

4) Who will be the leaders in each division to support and gain support for this effort?

5) Who would be involved in curriculum development in each division? What would be their roles? Is there a place for students and parents at some point in the curriculum review process?

6) How would you ensure follow-through on action items (to-do’s) as you create your curriculum development system?

7) What big-picture topics (i.e., each school year’s goals, student learning results, differentiation, etc.) would you want to integrate into your curriculum besides aligning standards and benchmarks?

8) What are your priorities in refining your current curriculum review system (or starting one from scratch)? In other words, how much can you take on and still be effective in this process?

9) What ultimately do you want your curriculum to do?

10) How will you provide your participants the time and coaching to learn the skills needed to develop the curriculum?

11) How will you get “buy in” from your participants to be curriculum designers?

12) How will you get buy-in from all of your educators to actively use the curriculum?

13) How do you share the curriculum? To whom?

14) What other questions (and answers) come to mind?

Curriculum Review and Collaboration

September 13, 2008 / / 1 Comment

Image Source: Adopted from Johneric Advento’s revised version of Margaret Carpenter’s original diagram

Our Shifting Our Schools podcast, Jeff’s and my blogs, and countless other podcasts and blogs share ways to help educators shift from traditional style, teacher-directed classrooms to what we call the Learning or School 2.0 model. This “shift” with all its edublogger advocates is about the change process, which we know is difficult to manage and is not happening very quickly.

While I enjoy discussing the big picture and ideas, my practice as an instructional technologist focuses on the practical, in-the-classroom instruction and assessment strategies that help transform classrooms into 21st-century learning communities.

My belief in bringing about this transformation is that schools must develop a curriculum and collaborative systematic model that becomes the mechanism for shifting our classrooms and our schools to the School 2.0 model. Sadly, curriculum development carries an uncomfortable connotation for many educators. The curriculum should be the driving force that guides so much of what we do to affect our students’ learning. If handled well, curriculum development, as a part of an engaged and thriving learning community, can be an exciting process that shifts and transforms our schools. This is obvious information, but sadly, we often put little thought into how we develop or follow through with our curriculum.

We often discussed this on our SOS podcast, with one show centered on the work of the International School Bangkok’s technology resource coordinators and literacy specialists. The ISB team constructed a curriculum development model, and recently, Kim Cofino created a collaboration flow chart that nicely presents a model for other schools to review and possibly adopt and individualize to meet their needs.

Back to the practical, Kim will present at the Learning 2.008 conference next week about the importance of curriculum and collaboration in bringing about the shift in our schools. After watching Kim’s slide show for her presentation, I remembered a workshop I started to assemble for another conference. It dealt with how a school learning community begins designing its curriculum and collaboration system. As I cannot attend the Learning 2.008 conference, it makes sense to get the components for my workshop out there as a practical way to help support Kim’s and others’ efforts. Each school is different, and whether one looks at the ISB model or the one we created at HKIS, developing the model needs to start by engaging all the stakeholders in the discussion.

My next posts will share the questions that teachers and administrators can use to start their discussion as they develop a systematic way to review curriculum that integrates the instructional strategies, content, assessments, and 21st-century learning skills that will shift their schools to the Learning 2.0 model.

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