In my previous post, I talked about Oracy, a concept I learned from a conference called Educa. There is still another topic that I found interesting and I would like to talk about in this post.
The Speaker
This topic is Collaborative Learning which was presented by Professor Christine Lee from the National Institute of Education, Singapore. Professor Lee joked that her initial C. L. actually stood for Collaborative Learning (a little joke from the presenter that brought a few laughs from the audience.) This talk particularly interested me because the content was from real experiences abroad. Hearing it would inspire us to want to develop our teaching and learning processes for, of course, student development. In this post, I will include some of the related contents from other speakers, too.
Professor Lee began with a sentence often spoken in Singapore. It was “no educational system can be better than the quality of its educators.” That hurt! haha! This is something very very important in Singapore. When selecting a teacher or an educator, Singapore would not only choose those with knowledge and abilities, another essential factor is that the person must also be highly motivated.
Plan – Do – See – Improve
Let us get into the detail of the topic. In Singapore, teaching and learning process follows a cycle of plan-do-see-improve. In other words, our teaching begins with good planning prior to actually teaching. When we teach, we need to look and observe what happens and use that to improve our process.
Seeing and Observing
Seeing and observing are the two things that need to be discussed a little bit more. Professor Kiyomi Akita from the University of Tokyo, Japan (another speaker that I had a chance to listen to at the conference) said that the seeing and observing step was essential. It was something we already did while teaching. The problem was that all we would do was to observe whether students participate or not.
That was not enough, according to Professor Akita. She said that what we needed to do more was to observe the learning process of each of the students. That means we would need to look at how students worked with one another, how and what they talked about, discussed and conversed with each other.
History
There was a little something about collaborative learning during Professor Lee’s talk. She said that collaborative learning was first introduced by John Dewey in 1916, which means that it is not something new at all.
Question
There should now be a question popped into our heads. How should we design our classes to accommodate collaborative learning? Professor Lee gave a simple answer. She said that to design an effective collaborative learning was to do anything that would encourage inquiry.
Example of Collaborative Learning
A simple example was to get students to experiment on something by asking such question as “Does light travel in straight line?”
That was all that we as a teacher would do. The rest of the process would be done by students. They would have to think among themselves. Based on the available tools and resources, students would have to design their own experiments or methods for finding the answer. During this process, students would get into groups, ask questions among themselves, discuss and finally make a decision on what should be done. We should never have to give out any procedures. Students would do everything by themselves.
Of course, we are very used to designing and giving out procedures or lab sheets so that students can follow the given instructions. As a result, students will be used to being given a manual. They will not be able to think by themselves.
The End
I hope that seeing this simple example and idea from Professor Lee should inspire us to apply the method to our teaching process. Of course, the aim is to develop necessary skills for our students.