Teaching tips: The importance of teacher collaboration

As every teacher already knows, the job of a teacher is not only restricted to the classroom. Teaching involves a lot of time spent on planning lessons, creating resources and assessing students' work. Most people who are not teachers do not always appreciate how much time all this takes. Teacher to teacher collaboration can definitely make teaching easier by reducing time spent on planning and creating resources. It can also make teaching more effective when teachers give insight about the abilities or interests of individual students. I will be listing the different ways of teaching collaboration.

• Communication between colleagues: simply communicating with other teachers who are involved with your students' education is enough to find out more about the weaknesses, strengths or interests of the students. Use this knowledge to create more targetted lesson plans. For example: you might learn that your students are very interested in painting, so you might find that using the theme of art in your lessons will help students learn better.
  
• Share resources: why spend time creating lesson plans or resources when another teacher has already done this? Resources do not have to necessarily belong to your students' age group. Talk to the teachers who was teaching your students the year before and ask them for the lesson plans used for a particular subject that you are going to be teaching in the near future. Use this information to tie-in your lessons with what the students have done in previous years. This is a great way of introducing a new lesson.
  
• Share the work load: if you know of teachers teaching the same subject as you, then it might be a good idea to plan your lessons together. Decide on who does what; for example you can work on the lesson plans while the other teacher creates the resources to be used for those lessons.

Please feel free to share more ideas with us by leaving a comment with this post.
Take care, and as always, I'll keep you posted.