Collaboration Paper
Introduction
Education is essential for the progress and development of a country. It is necessary that knowledge is delivered from generation to generation to deliver understanding of all aspects of nature to the people. For this sacred duty the most intelligent minds are hired to deliver education to the blooming flowers of the nation, by presenting them with content, understanding and examples of nature in understanding of these concepts. The profession of teaching is thousands of years old and it is respected since humans started civilizing Learning process started when humans started interacting with their environment and became curious for answers to naturally occurring phenomenon. In modern teaching a concept of collaborative teaching has introduced in which students help each other in understanding concepts of the class. In this essay I will describe the concept of co-teaching, provide my personal opinion about it, and provide reasons for my rationale. I will also describe the concept of pedagogy and my beliefs about learning.
Discussion
Collaborative teaching or co-teaching in our education system has introduced when multiple disciplines are introduced and students were taught these advanced subjects. Not every student has the capability to understand each and every concept taught in class and for this they need additional help. The ideal approach for teaching is that teacher should be able to describe the concepts in detail to every student irrespective of student’s learning ability and mental competence. However, as learning ability of all students is not same and teachers can only provide enough attention to every student as time is limited and a big amount of course is to be covered. This creates a problem that some concepts are not understood by some students and they need some other source to understand these concepts.
In our education system two types of collaborative learning exists; inside and outside classroom. In inside type of collaborative learning students take help from each other in the class about concepts they were unable to understand during teacher’s lecture. During my experience of teaching I saw this thing in almost every lecture that students are talking to each other. When pointed out and asked about why they are talking to each other? they gave reason they are discussing the topic one of them did not understood and other one is explaining it to him.
The environment of class is designed to provide knowledge to the students and this method gets greatly interrupted when students talk to each other. It creates disturbance in the class and effects other students who are willing to listen to the teacher. Talking to each other because of any reason is violation of the class disciplines and makes it difficult for the teacher to deliver lecture. In class collaborative teaching is also discouraged as the student who is delivering knowledge to the other may not be the expert of the topic and provide false information to his fellow. This factor can lead to more consequences if that student applies the concept learned by his fellow in his exams where it can lead to deduction of marks or failure. While learning from a fellow a student puts himself at risk of missing the other important concepts teacher is teaching at that time. The outside class type of collaborative learning though not has these negative impacts on the students but it encourages them in copying each other’s work leading to plagiarism which is highly discouraged in education.
The importance of content in teaching cannot be denied in any educational environment as it is the bases for the learning program that is about to be delivered to the students. The content is the compilation of knowledge, skills and processes that will be required for teaching the students about the subjects. It is the very first and most important step of teaching which describes the whole process formulated for the class and the end goal of the whole course. This content governs how the students will be provided with all the concepts of the course and the method of their evaluation. It also includes the schedule and timely distribution of each lecture and the content of the lecture.
The content of teaching is devised by analyzing the whole class that will be taught the course. It is organized based on learning ability, interest, and level of education of each student. Every student has different levels of interest, and learning ability to a specific subject. Being different in these factors, some students will have previous knowledge, and interest in the subject and some will have less understanding of the content as well as less interest in the subject, therefore there is need to set the content by analyzing these factors of every student. Many strategies are available to include differentiation in teaching and they are currently applied in almost every education system of the world.
Conclusion
In short, the process of learning being the most important part of self-development process of any individual, needs to be done with proper care. The teachers face a lot of difficulties with in class collaborative teaching occurs and it hinders students learning of the subject in the class. The main aim of every class is to deliver knowledge to every student in the class and for this purpose teachers will have to adapt new strategies of differentiation and formulate their content according to requirements of the course and personal factors of each student. Ensuring that no collaborative teaching occurs, and students are taught by incorporating their differences will finally lead to best education delivery to the students and help us improve the quality of our education.
