So, it’s the most exciting time of the week (for me at least): I have a new publication out! It’s about Collaborative Coteaching and Teacher Learning. I wrote it with Joanne Yoo and @ninaburridge1. Here’s a link (https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ajte/vol44/iss4/5/ …) and here’s what it’s about: (THREAD)
Most of my publications are about civics and citizenship education. This one is a little bit different and is actually a partner paper to ‘Getting the most from Google Classroom’, published here: https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ajte/vol43/iss3/9/ …. In these papers, we look at…
the practice of teaching and learning in higher education contexts. Lots of universities are doing interesting things in this space at the moment – online, flipped, blended learning models are common and there’s some interesting stuff about learning management systems too.
Of course, not all of these are done purely out of pedagogical ideas of best practice. Instead, there are competing notions of cost, access, need and so on. We are mindful of this in this paper.
However, we wanted to explore collaborative coteaching. We had an opportunity where we could combine two classes in our educational ethics subject or teach them separately. We decided to put them together and see how coteaching worked.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard of coteaching. It was spoken of in almost mythical terms in some high schools I’ve worked in – but no one had ever actually seen it done. The reasons: cost too much. No space to try it. Too hard to organise.
So we decided to try it in a higher education space over the course of one semester, in 3 hour seminars with between 70 and 80 students in each seminar. These weren’t lectures – oh, no. They were very active, focused learning sessions.
We adopted Whitehead’s (2009) living theory methodology to try to explain what we found. We also made use of the subject coordinator @ninaburridge1 as a critical friend. We wrote reflective journal entries at the end of each session – and then showed them to each other.
What did we find? Well, our co-teaching approaches evolved over time. From a piecemeal approach at the beginning, we became more capable of collaborating than we did at the start.
Students also really enjoyed the idea of having more than one person to talk to about concepts or ideas that they were struggling with. We were also able to use cogenerative dialogue to model different ways of teaching – something students really appreciated.
And we were able to be ‘adventurous’ – trying new teaching ideas that we never would have before or alone.
Anyway, that’s the barest summary. If this interest you, go have a look here: https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ajte/vol44/iss4/5/ …@schoolofeduts