Collaboration in the classroom

Collaboration is vital to improve learning for all students. If we don’t have collaborative classrooms then we are likely to have competitive ones. If competition is the basis for motivating learning then that will be great for some students but means others will lose out. People often say that we need competition to succeed, it is what pushes us to do better. It seems that Governments and education departments love to encourage competition. Competition between schools through the MY School Website (who scores the best and encouraging the advertising of those scores so parents can exercise choice between schools), allowing a school system that provides such a wide range economic advantage/disadvantage challenging schools to compete against each other for students and performance pay that focuses on rewarding a limited number of teachers for achieving at a high level. When competition is the aim it creates winners and losers. Some schools win on the My School website some lose, some teachers win on performance pay while some good teachers will lose, live in a poor socioeconomic school zone lose, live in a good socioeconomic situation win! People who support competition will say that it is good because it replicates real life, meaning “the time in your life you become independent and begin working”, which is true, not everyone wins. But we don’t want winners and losers with regards to education. Every child should get an equal crack at education, there should be no losers. Lastly I personally like competition, it’s one of the reasons I play comeptitive sport and it will naturally occur within our classrooms. I don’t think this should be squashed but it should be monitored. When we look at our own classrooms hopefully we see much more collaboration than competition to improve student learning.

I found this great video via Tanja Galetti @tgaletti on Twitter, Collaboration in the Classroom.