Reflection On Collaborative Working

1050 Words3 Pages

From my personal experience of working as part of a team to produce the teaching pack I learned a lot about collaborative working. Collaborative working is when a group work together in order to achieve a shared goal. Members of the group encourage one another and provide each other with help and support in order to promote success (Johnson and Johnson, 1999).

One of the main things I have learned from my experience is that working collaboratively encourages students to create and uphold friendships with peers. When groups are assigned by the teacher it provides an opportunity for students to meet and get to know more of their classmates. I noticed that as relationships grow between group members so does the rate of productivity. There is …show more content…

One way that I could do this would be to designate the children with different jobs/roles within their group. For instance, group leader who would be responsible for making sure everyone does their job and completes the task on time; scribe who would be responsible for writing what the group decides, reporter who would be responsible for reporting to the class what the group has done at the end of the task; coach who would be responsible for finding ways to encourage team members and so on. This would give each child a sense of importance and belonging to the group as it makes them feel like the group needs them in order to complete the …show more content…

It requires an array of skills that as a teacher I will need to help my own pupils develop. Collaborative working can help form positive relationships and as these relationships grow so do rates of productivity and achievement. Groups members should be interdependent and learn from each other as everyone has something different to offer. What I have learned will impact my teaching practice in a number of ways as I now recognise that collaborative working and group work are not the same thing and that as a teacher I need to facilitate ways in which collaborative working can be carried out effectively and to the benefit of all.





References

Allen, M (2010) Misconceptions in Primary Science, Open University Press, McGraw-Hill Education, pp 4-5

Association for Science Education (2011) BE SAFE! 4th edn, p10

David W. Johnson & Roger T. Johnson (1999) Making cooperative learning work, Theory Into Practice, 38:2, 67-73, DOI: 10.1080/00405849909543834

Gillies, R. (2003). Structuring cooperative group work in classrooms. International Journal of Educational Research, 39, pp

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