Collaboration 5.5.4

I can now distinguish between two things: collaboration and effective collaboration. In principle, I have known and practiced collaboration but rarely taken into account that the activities that comprise the collaboration could have either been replaced with better ones - more effective in realising lesson objectives - or refined to make them more effective. Several lessons tend to put the cart before the horse by asking the wrong questions like "How can I make my lesson more collaborative?", "What technology can I use to make this lesson 'better'? etc. Instead, it would have been important to ask questions like: "How can I make collaboration make me realise my lesson objectives?" and the like. Collaboration should not be seen as an element of a lesson but as the defining theme of the lesson.

The whole lesson or set of lessons is one collaborative process or set of collaborative processes harmonised by the teacher to cultivate the desired experience in the learner. The teacher's role in this process is to set the scene and prompt the learners thinking in every possible way and, later, to adjudicate over the collaboration process as the knowledge is created, reorganized and shared - this , of course, using several tools like ipads, laptops, google docs, wikis etc. Current real-time communication tools allow students to exchange ideas in a manner that more closely approximates the face-to-face experience.

Collaboration should employ social skills which enable all learners to have their say and for the class or group (s) to reach consensus on how the final work should look like. Knowledge, skills and values learnt through collaboration should be used to solve real world problems and yield lasting results. Learners should be able to see the relationship between what they are collaborating to produce in class and the experiences around them.

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