Authentic Collaborative Classroom

From the books, I learned from experts two things about collaboration in the classroom: one it can engage the students into active learning among themselves; another it can meaningfully involve the learners into self-regulated learning. In these two conditions, the teacher is a facilitator and process moderator in setting the classroom conditions to support and meet the learning requirements and allow for authentic learning experiences to take place.

I feel that I sound so rhetorical in my introduction, well that was the same how the books I read taught me - use big words to catch the acedemic reader's attention, then stiffen their neck in their attempt to understand the buzz. I thought engaging the learners into collaboration simply ends in keeping them busy with group works, paired works, or triadic exercises. And, as long as I could sense that the students are happy with what they are doing, such form of collaboration should be considered a success. From books, I am now thinking out of the box.

I realized that a collaborative classroom is more than engaging instructional activities, where learners learn with other learners. I realized further that a collaborative classroom should apply the engaging principles of shared responsibilities across the various aspects of instruction. It's not too late for me to learn this, after teaching for more than a decade. I had regrets though, wishing that I had learned this from the start of my teaching career - to make a collaborative classroom work, students must take part in all the essential processes in learning and in teaching. My reflection made me aware that students need not be passive listeners. Instead, they should be motivated by actually driving them into learning by doing. This can be done in various ways.

One way is to have the students read, think and talk about what the teacher is supposed to know. Applied to the routinary lecture, the variation is that students must be given more opportunity (time particularly) to process the content in their own way. Here, the teachers are the ones who should listen more, to guide the students through the right concepts with inquiries coupled with genuine affirmations.

Another way is to enable the students to process learning-content through group activities. In such interfaces, the students are to be guided and monitored in their discussion or work task. The expected outcomes and the ways in which the students will be evaluated, must also be placed as collobarating classroom decision. With this decision-making on setting expectations and measures of evaluation, the students views are acknowledge and further refined so that they may align to meet desired learning outcomes.

These two ways are just the tip of the iceberg of classroom collaboration. My point is a little radical - that I now see the silverlining of involving students in the aspects of setting classroom rules, developing test instruments, deciding on topics to be included in the discussion, setting deadlines for work submissions, presenting the lesson content, planning and implementing instructional activities, and evaluating the teaching-learning processes. These are but a few, I have in my consideration of effecting authentic classroom collaboration.

Such idea of authentic classroom collaboration may sound to be a new nomenclature. But I speak with my naive knowledge of my native experience as a teacher. An authentic collaborative classroom has depth and breadth to encourage student participation in constructing active, engaging, motivating, responsible and self-regulated classroom: a classroom that recognizes individual uniqueness and learner diversity driven together to meet the desired learning outcomes.

I have tried and succeeded in many of the other things I have mentioned about the application of the concept of authentic collaborative classroom. It will bring me joy to describe them in my succeeding blogs, because reflecting on my practice enables me to a better teacher.