The Power of Collaboration
Collaborating with our colleagues as a way of keeping our teaching fresh
I’ve always loved the descriptive nature of German words and the word kontaktfreudig is a good example. It literally means something like “happy with contact” and we’d translate it as sociable or outgoing (Ich bin sehr kontaktfreudig = I’m very sociable/outgoing). I guess many of us teachers would describe ourselves as kontaktfreudig. Many of us probably went into the profession because we like contact with young people and wish to play a significant role in their lives.
Besides the daily contact with my students, one of the other big advantages of being a teacher is the potential for collaboration with my teacher colleagues. Over the past seven weeks I’ve been really fortunate to meet quite a few teachers in Canada, Switzerland and Germany and and I’ve spent many hours observing their lessons and discussing languages pedagogy with them. One of the highlights for me was collaborating with Tina Abour, a French and English teacher at the Georg-Büchner-Gymnasium in Bad Vilbel. Tina and I undertook a a simple piece of action research and professional dialogue that I found really rewarding. It reminded me of how rewarding it can be to collaborate with a colleague by observing a lesson and having a professional dialogue afterwards to discuss what went well and what could be improved.
Tina Abour and myself at the Georg-Büchner-Gymnasium, Bad Vilbel
Tina’s lesson involved Story Listening with a class in their second year of learning French. Story listening is a common comprehensible input (CI) technique. It involved pupils listening to a story that is made entirely comprehensible by the storyteller, and is a great way of providing optimal input for our students. Dr. Beniko Mason is one of the most well-known advocates of story listening and has done a lot of research into its efficacy.
Tina had two parallel French classes in the same year group. First, she did her story listening lesson with the first class, then we discussed what went well and what could be improved. She then did the same lesson again with the modifications we’d discussed.
In the first lesson, Tina told a really great story about an Emporer in China who was looking for a successor. He sets a challenge for all the children in the kingdom to see who could be a suitable successor. One boy, Ping, thinks he’s failed the challenge, but a twist towards the end of the story results in Ping becoming the sucessor. It’s a simple story with a moral message about honesty that everyone (even adolescents!) can relate to. Tina told the story using images displayed on the board, which helped make it completely comprehensible. Students noted new vocabulary on the board and seemed to really enjoy the 45 minute lesson. It was wonderful to witness Tina’s warm, positive relationship with her students as she told the story.
Traditionally, story listening is exactly that – students sit and listen to the story and acquire the language as they comprehend the message. Tina’s class were fully engaged, but I wondered whether some other classes might require more structure to the lesson by segmenting it more. I also wondered whether pupils’ learning could be stretched even further by adding a few things to the basic telling of the story.
As we discussed the lesson, we decided to make a few simple modifications to the class.
1. Turn and talk. Rather than sitting for the entire lesson passively listening to the story, in the second lesson Tina stopped the story every 5-6 minutes and got the students to discuss what had happened so far. Now, some people who are very input focused might see this as “forced output” and a missed opportunity for input. However, we both felt that these short breaks provided a bit of release from the input, and made for a lesson that felt more structured. After a minute of discussion, Tina resumed the story. She did this a number of times throughout the lesson.
2. True / false questions. At the end of the lesson, Tina displayed ten true/false questions on the board. In pairs, students answered these quiz questions. This provided more input based on the story, and had the advantage that students were reading, as well as listening.
3. Write and discuss. After the story, Tina started to recap the whole thing by typing up the story on the board while pupils wrote this down. She did this in an interactive way, asking lots of questions to the students about what happened in the story. All of this was in the target language. Asking students to write up from the board meant they were doing scaffolded writing and ended up with an accurate piece of writing. This part of the lesson involved speaking, reading and writing – I always feel that a multi-modal lesson helps students remember the language we’re teaching.
By making a few simple modifications, the second lesson felt a more structured and focused than the first. Of course, the first lesson would be fine in certain circumstances, but the second lesson might lend itself better to when a class needs more structure and scaffolding. It reminded me how important it is for us teachers to have a toolbox of modifications we can use spontaneously, when we feel a lesson needs it.
The relentless nature of daily life in school, can mean professional dialogue and collaboration go out the window - it’s even more difficult in countries like Scotland and England where teacher contact time is incredibly high compared to our neighbours. However, the experience with Tina reminded me that it doesn’t take much to undertake a short collaborative project or action research. I firmly believe that if we teachers are curious, engaged and open to learning from each other, our students will sense this and be more open, curious and engaged themselves. Perhaps we all need to remember to be more kontaktfreudig with our colleagues in school!
If you wish to share your own experience of collaborating with colleagues, feel free to comment below…