Today's post will be an attempt to play with several ideas presented so far - collaborative learning, lesson planning and student-centred teaching. It might seem a bit preposterous, but it may turn out to be a good idea.
Without elaborating on the separate aspects, let it suffice to say that each of them may contribute enormously to autonomous learning, self-assurance and collaboratively achieved learning outcomes. Most teachers will agree that these three aspects are more than necessary if the intended objective is to help students learn how to use what they have learnt both in spoken and written communication. What is more, they will learn how they can pass their knowledge on to other students and that certainly is a good foundation for all those students training to become teachers of English. Those students who are not going to be involved in the practice of teaching will have an opportunity to work on their presentation and communication skills, team work and collaborative achievement.
The first step in the realisation of the idea of collaborative lesson planning would be to make groups of students who are going to teach a certain segment as a team. A group of three to five students is most efficient. However, if a segment to teach is rather elaborate, more than five students may be engaged, but anything more than seven students per segment would be too many.
The second step would be to define the online tools the teams are going to use for their collaboration. The teacher may decide to suggest a selection of obligatory tools or leave it to the team to decide on which tools they prefer to use. Either way, the tools must fulfil three criteria:
1. They have to be web-based;
2. They have to be available free of charge and
3. They have to allow sharing.
The third step is to categorise the tools and say which of them should be used for which part of the lesson planning process.
In line with that, each student team would need a work space or wiki which they would use as a mutual space to share ideas, post material or even discuss options. That space would have to be closed and password protected.
My first choices for a collaborative space are: PBworks workspace, PBworks wiki hub and Google sites. Each one of these is easily created, free of charge for smaller groups and the sharing options can be defined precisely.
Each student team would further need an online document tool to prepare their lesson plan in. I believe that such an efficient tool is Google docs because it is easy to use, Word documents can be imported easily and access to the document can be limited to only those members who are part of the team. If necessary, the teacher can be added to the list of members allowed to share the document in order to monitor the preparation of the lesson plan. Another option would be Microsoft online which is as close to Microsoft office as it can get; therefore, it is easy to use, share, combine, etc.
Another step would be to define a tool which will allow setting up a time line, scheduling activities and planning steps. For that purpose, an online calendar should be used, such as Google calender, 30boxes, Teamup.com, etc. Each of the mentioned calendars can be shared and edited by the team members which makes planning and scheduling tasks, activities and assignments easy to complete.
Regarding the various tasks and activities that are going to be planned by the teaching teams, the student teachers should be instructed to choose carefully. Students should be made aware of the fact that they do not necessarily have to plan computer-assisted teaching segments. They can prepare classes conducted in various traditional ways and manners. The fact that they use web-based and computer-assisted tools to prepare the lesson will be a huge step forward.
