Reflection

At the start of this project I thought that collaboration would be a cinch. I thought nothing could be easier since I am collaborating with my friend and mentor who I know and get along with well. I did not anticipate the difficulty of using a wiki to demonstrate our collaborative process. Nor did I expect to be so detached since I was not actually working at the school on a daily basis. Finally, there was some communication break down that I also did not expect.

First, my collaborating teacher and I are quite social. We love to collaborate in person and on the phone. We both were comfortable emailing documents to one another and links to websites, etc. However, demonstrating our work on a wiki site was much more challenging. In addition to collaborating on a unit plan for students, I also had the challenge of coaching my partner through some technological difficulties. While we were able to overcome our obstacle, I was surprised at how much time we spent sorting it out. I think that if the wiki were not required for the class, we would have not included that technology component in our collaboration. However, I can see the advantages of using a wiki for collaboration with different personality types, distance learning collaborations, and for collaboration projects that involve more participants. I also, see the value of the experience in this particular class. If I were to do this project over again, I would dedicate more time at the beginning to learning the ins and outs of how to use the wiki. Then I would dedicate a specific amount of time instructing my collaborating teacher(s) on how to use the wiki.

It would have been beneficial for me to be acting as a librarian in the school where Diane teaches. Since I was not the librarian in that school, our collaboration did not reach the depth that one would want as a full time librarian. I was not there on a daily basis to anticipate Diane's needs. Nor did we have a continuous conversation about how the collaboration was going in the classroom on a daily basis. While we did communicate about the day to day process over the phone, it is different than being able to touch base with one another in person and in the midst of the action. Had I been in the building, I could have observed more of the classroom activities and I could have been of more assistance in the library as the students were researching and writing. Being present for observation would also have increased my ability to access the progress of the students. Being present is really essential for the assessment process of outcome based learning.

Finally, one of my major blunders was not communicating the purpose of certain types of assessment and evaluation techniques. Also, I faltered in communicating the exact process I envisioned for the unit. If you have checked out the wiki you will notice two things that resulted from these mistakes. One is that there are two rubrics available for evaluated the final writing project. One rubric is the one Diane used and that the students were used to. The other rubric is one that was created by both of us, focused on information literacy and writing standards. It was my hope to use the rubric we collaborated on because it was directly related to the outcomes we hoped to achieve by doing the unit. However, I did not communicate the importance of this type of rubric and Diane was not comfortable using it. The second mistake was that I did not communicate that the rubric should be given to the students at the start of the assignment so that they knew exactly what they needed to accomplish. Also, I mentioned giving the students deadlines throughout the assignment as goals for them to achieve, but this did not happen. I think it was because I simply did not communicate these items well. You will notice in the lesson plan for the writing assignment Diane mentioned that the students requested specific instruction on what to write and a rubric for the writing assignment. I was surprised when I read this because I thought I communicated the need for those two things to be distributed to the students.

Overall, I think our collaboration unit was a good starting point. It could be made better with a few modifications. Those modifications include the librarian being more present during the actual unit, using a rubric that is directly related to the teaching standards and making sure the students know where they are going and what they are doing throughout the unit.