1 - Collaborative Unit Overview and Rationale

Learning Goal

The goal of this unit is for you, the teacher candidates, to teach one another how to work collaboratively to embed universal design for learning, diversity, and accessibility into co-constructed learning resources. The learners will be completing this project asynchronously as part of subject specialist groups. Therefore, you will need to be comfortable with the content and will be familiar with their group members from other subject-specific courses. You will be placed in learning groups within the learning management systems using readily available internal tools and settings. You will only see your group members' work, not those of the other groups. Learners can communicate with one another and the instructor via internal course email, chat, discussion thread, video notes, audio notes, and VoiceThread. This variety in communication strategies provides diversity and equity options for all learners.

The final assignment will be submitted via a specific Assignment folder in the LMS. You will be assessed on your collaboration and teamwork as part of your final assessment. Rubric and assessment details are available on a separate page of this website.

Rationale

Bernier and Stenstrom (2016) state that learners and educators need help working collaboratively, and even teacher candidates, who will be responsible for building collaborative learning experiences for their learners, often find working collaboratively, even asynchronously online, less than optimal. Bernier and Stenstrom (2016, p.55) further note that "successful professional life demands working closely with others in various collegial, peer, team, and group configurations. On the one hand, we know these skills are important; on the other, improving our pedagogy in teaching them remains largely elusive." Working in Professional Learning Communities is a professional fact of life for full-time teachers in Ontario as they are mandated by the Ministry of Education. Therefore, learning from the start of their career how to work collaboratively as part of a subject-specific professional learning group will assist teacher candidates in developing effective professional skills.  Pamohov's (2018) research indicates that productive group work encourages learner accountability, with the added benefit of relieving some of the instructor's burden for facilitating learning. Rezaei (2018, p.1) suggests that collaborative learning motivates learners as it helps them to see problems from multiple perspectives, thus enhancing creativity, a useful benefit for teacher candidates. Rezaei (2018, p.1) cites Grochia and Miller (1996), stating that learners express more satisfaction when learning collaboratively. However, in the case of this course project, further research is warranted by obtaining learner feedback. Wen (2022, p.77) clearly explains the importance of collaborative learning as it is essential in developing learner self-efficacy, creative skill development, and social cohesion. Emotional development and social capabilities are also developed via collaborative learning (Wen, 2022, p. 77). Each of these researchers reinforces the need for additional collaborative learning opportunities for teacher candidates in Ontario. However, placements interfere with a small group and in-person collaborative learning. Bickle and Rucker (2018) advocate for humanizing online collaboration, and this unit attempts to accomplish the normalcy of professional, asynchronous online collaboration using a learning management system. Therefore, this unit plan was created to facilitate and demonstrate the efficacy of asynchronous small group collaboration with the eye that school departments could use to develop effective learning resources collaboratively in the future.

Sample Course Map Accompanying this Course

Select the document below to view the entire course map. This is a sampel course map used in a Faculty of Education Literacy and Learning in the Intermediate Senior Curriculum course. The unit is broken down into the following pages in more depth.