As educators, our ultimate destination is student achievement and we need to reform our thinking to make sure that collaboration is a part of the journey. The team here at Teacherly strives to ensure that collaboration is not a chore but rather an education-enriching process that can be enhanced by social networks and technology.
Learning becomes more accessible and effective for students when educators come together to collaborate and share resources, ideas and expertise.
The beauty of collaboration is not just the ability to tap into various perspectives and ideas but also to share responsibility for students’ learning.
Renaldo Lawrence, a recent feature of our Teacherly Stories, talks about the importance of community, ‘especially for teachers’.
“One of the craziest things that teachers do is work by themselves. I create a lesson or an asset for a particular curriculum, and then John down the road at a different school will create the same thing for the same curriculum. We need more collective thinking. In some ways, COVID-19 could be the best thing that has happened to education. It has highlighted a lot of our inadequacies and made us realize that we need to do better.”
Emphasising Renaldo’s wise words, one of the key benefits of collaboration within the teaching community is less teacher isolation. Having the opportunity to share ideas and information combats professional loneliness and frustration, improving staff morale and professional satisfaction. This feeling of togetherness is vital especially when we may return to remote learning and will need to embrace a more flexible approach to teaching.
How to collaborate when you’re remote
Technology plays a significant role in modern teacher collaboration and participating in a Professional Learning Network (PLN) on social media or through an online platform gives you direct and easy access to knowledge, experience and resources from educators who you may have never connected with otherwise.
Twitter is an example of collaborating remotely via social media. It serves as an amazing digital hub for educators to share ideas and resources. You can also easily find relevant twitter chats to take part in and discuss any given topic.
While Twitter is a fantastic resource, it doesn’t help you to face one of the most common challenges of effective collaboration, which is the lack of collaboration in real time and the inability to focus on working together to solve a given issue.
Effective online collaboration
To collaborate effectively, it’s important for teachers to choose collaboration rather than feeling forced. At Teacherly, we’ve ensured that our new and improved platform takes into consideration effective collaborative strategies to set the stage for successful, high quality teacher collaboration so that teachers want to collaborate.
Teacherly not only gives you access to thousands of pre created templates, but also acts as a workflow tool to allow you to plan, deliver and teach your lessons either remotely or online.
How do we make sure that teacher collaboration is at the heart of lesson planning?
- Work spaces
Reach your ultimate zen goals by organising your teams into ‘workspaces’. Workspaces were designed to enhance collaboration within a specific team. Together, you can work on specific lessons, educational resources and monitor student progress .
- Access a global community
We’ve made it easy to collaborate outside your direct Professional Learning Network. With Teacherly, you have the opportunity to connect with over 14,000 users across the globe — we provide a collaborative experience that will be sure to enhance your global thinking.
- Teacher circle
Long gone are the days of fumbling through Whatsapp or emails to contact your fellow educators. With the teacher circle you can easily communicate with your team or the individuals you enjoy collaborating with. We’ve created a chat where you can easily attach a file, or leave a video or audio message for them explaining your concerns. Furthermore, our annotation feature allows you to pinpoint where you have a concern or a tip.
- Share
If you’re new to the world of teacher collaboration and need some time to adjust, don’t worry, our platform has made it easy to share your lessons publicly with the rest of the Teacherly users. Similarly, you will be able to access pre created templates from various teachers who also choose to share their lessons publicly.
Strong collaborative cultures develop over time and require hard work and commitment. While the benefits are undeniable, Teacherly aims to make it easy and free for all teachers to easily access or create their own Professional Learning Community or Network to work together and increase student achievement and advance their own skills and knowledge.
If you’re interested in knowing more about Teacherly or trying it out, sign up here for free or get in touch with ashna@teacherly.io for a personal demo of the platform.
