Collaborative School Strategies: Teamwork in Education

Competency collaboration is as a result critical in today’s educational milieu that is characterized by competitiveness. Collaborative School Strategies methods involve organizing the learners, instructors, principals, and often parents and other stakeholders dedicated to attaining educational objectives collectively. These strategies are essential in promoting positive student achievement and developing pedagogy to create a better learning climate for all student success. This article will discuss a few categories of Collaborative School Strategies and their advantages and disadvantages.

What are Collaborative School Strategies?

Organizational school strategies are working strategies that involve members among stakeholders in the school systems. They prominently feature collaborative decision-making, mutual resource utilization, and group issue-solving. It is important to note that all these strategies also improve student learning and development and foster good relationships between stakeholders in the learning institutions, families, and the community.

They identified the following types of Collaborative School Strategies;

• Professional Learning Communities Teachers (PLC T)
  A PLC is a professional learning community which is a group of teachers that meet to learn from one another, to share strategies, and troubleshoot concerning teaching. This strategy means that there is an opportunity for regular teacher meetings for purposes of planning, developing, and implementing lessons, student formative and summative assessments, and class conduct. For instance, a set of English teachers teaching in a high school may convene once a week to view, interpret, and consider innovative methods of teaching their students how to read and write, enhancing their pedagogy, and assessing the progress of those learners.
• Co-Teaching
  Co-teaching means when at least two teachers who may have different specializations take charge of a class and teach the same set of pupils. This approach makes it possible to tailor learning to fit the students in the classrooms since the teachers can easily notice the weaknesses of different students. An example could involve a special education teacher sharing a class with an ordinary teacher to ensure that every child, no matter his or her learning disability, has a teacher to look after him or her.

Team-Based Learning (TBL)

• By organizing the students in groups, each composed of several members, the students work in a team on assignments, projects, and/or problems. The effectiveness of this strategy is based on the organization of group work and collaborative problem-solving side by side with peer education which in turn fosters the modern student’s social and cognitive needs. An example of applying TBL in a classroom is students in a science class engaging in a common project of coming up with an experiment that they will conduct, where every learner will use their areas of strength, to enhance their learning.
• Peer Tutoring
  Peer tutoring refers to students working together to teach one another, thus encompasses the purpose of learning. Advanced or senior students teach first or second-grade students in all academic areas but also develop friendship bonds. For instance, in middle school, with the developmental structure of grouping, tutors who are the seventh graders will have a better understanding of the subject thereby making them correct the mistakes of the sixth graders in math.
• P&C
  When the schools involve the parents and the community in the activity it will improve the fate of the students. The use of parents to contribute their time by volunteering in classrooms or attending meetings or workshops shows how schools develop a strong support system to enhance the success of students. For example, a school might have an annual ‘Family Science Nights’ where the parents and students are engaged in science projects in support of what is learned in class.

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Collaborative School Strategies: Conclusions

• Higher levels of student learning and interactions
  there is always high students’ interest, concentration, and enthusiasm when they are in a group studying with their peers. An example of these methods is the team approach to learning and peer tutoring where the student becomes an actor in his learning process thereby having a higher chance of retaining and understanding what is taught.
• Deeper Professionalism for Teachers
  Teachers get to learn something new from their colleagues as they work together to accomplish a certain task. One of the advantages of integrating PLCs or co-teaching is that teachers who work in the classroom can work on skills improvement, exchange new teaching methodologies, and collaborate on how to solve difficulties that arise in class.
• Enhanced Social Skills
  Grouping boosts interpersonal relations among students in the classroom since students learn the following skills; communication, courtesy, and cooperation. These skills are important for learning, particularly when it comes to school or future employment and other opportunities in life.
• Better school-community relationship
  Parent and community participation enhances the school-community relationship. This way fosters students’ extended resource network, which in turn enhances the rates of attendance, eradication of misbehavior, and enhanced academic performance.
• Academic Support for Diverse Learning Profiles
  Integrating approaches, for example, team teaching and cross-age peer teaching help the schools respond to the diverse needs of the learners. In this way, teachers can address students with different learning abilities or difficulties given that they cooperate.

Strategies for collaborative school development

• Time Constraints
  This just shows that probably the major downside of all collaborative approaches is the lack of time or time for teachers and students to collaborate. It may be challenging to set time in particular schools for day-to-day PLCs, co-teaching, or for including the parents in the learning process.
• Resource Limitations
  Cuestas cooperativas a menudo implican un requerimiento adicional de organización y esfuerzo como capacitación, tiempo de planeación o materiales. Some schools may feel the pinch when it comes to financing the support of these programmes due to their meager resources.
• Resistance to Change
  People within the educational work environment may not be ready to embrace new collaborative ideas since they are new or they present new ways of teaching or learning. The process of overcoming developing and implementing ways to reduce or eliminate resistance and improve organizational culture and collaboration can be emphasized and time-consuming.
• Unequal Participation
• Participation from all parties of the stakeholders is key in processes that involve collaborative strategies where the parties involved may include teachers in the classroom, students, and parents. In case some of the persons are not vested, the productivity of the collaboration may be adversely affected.

Conclusion

School-based partnerships in given a wide variety of benefits that embrace such as increased academic achievement; social competence; and better school-community relationships. But there are benefits of collaboration in schools as; Sources Time sometimes becomes a factor, while some staff may not be willing to change. By adopting these strategies, schools will have developed a favorable climate of learning with overall improved benefits for students and instructors.

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Collaborative School Strategies: Improving Education Through Teamwork