Collaborative Planning

     One of the main benefits to collaborative unit planning is that all work immediately becomes peer-reviewed. This aids in the planning stage by having someone vet ideas and sequencing, as well as helps highlight cross-curricular connections in order to create rich and engaging lessons. Another aspect related to this is that collaborative assessment planning allows teachers to ensure that success criteria are being met and assessed in the same manner for all students. 

     In my practicum my associate teacher was the only grade 7/8 math teacher. As a result, when I took over the grade 8 math portion I found I had no one to plan with and no idea whether my lessons were any good. While I could have turned to my associate for guidance, he was very laid back with respect to planning and had a very traditional approach to teaching that I hoped to stray from. This left me unsure whether my lessons and activities would sink or swim when the time came. I recall having students use playing cards to make fractions during an addition exercise, and they really seemed to enjoy this. I decided to try the same thing again with multiplication the next week and found the students to be wholly unenthusiastic. I found out later when conferencing with them that it was a fun novelty the first time, but that it got really repetitive and dull overall---something I had not considered at the time. Another benefit of collaborative planning is that while the expectations, big ideas, and goals of a unit will be overwhelming to any single person, the work can be drastically cut down when working as a group.

     A few years ago collaborative planning of a task revolved around email. One person would send an email to the group, then it would be a series of reply-alls until the original content of the message was so watered down that everyone had a different idea of what was happening in the project. It was always fun to be awoken at 3:00 in the morning by a notification on your BlackBerry that Person 4 had replied "ok" to Person 2, who had emailed to say which days they could not meet in response to Person 3's email about when they were going to get a book from the library....And so on. It was like the game telephone we all played as kids that invariably descended into chaos and incoherence.

     Thankfully Google Docs (and many other resources) now exist. Docs allows files to be shared across a group of people and edited in real time. This is a big upgrade from files stored on networks (like at Xerox where I once worked) where only one person could edit any file at a time. Files could be opened by several people at once, but the edits all overwrote each other. It was a nightmare. Docs avoids this. You could have dozens of people collaborating on the same file at any given time, and all changes are recorded and visible to others. And what's more is that changes are all logged so that you can go back in the document history should there be any disasters. Docs also allows you to add comments, which notifies participants via email (should there be any important updates), and share the final document in a read-only capacity with outsiders.

     I had no personal experience with collaborating over Google Docs until term 1, when my group used it for a collaborative unit assessment plan for grade 7 math. In order to organize the work we broke the material into a chart and assigned each member a section that they were to work on. Text was coloured so that members could easily see who had made changes and where, and this made it apparent when certain group members took charge thereby introducing a degree of accountability in the work.