5. Attention to diversity. Collaborative learning

Once we have experienced a collaborative activity such as the group of experts, it has arrived the time for us to design one.
As the aims of this subject are both acquiring new knowledge about counselling and school guidance and increasing our teaching backpack with new methodologies and didactic resources (ICT, classroom management, activities...), during the next sessions we are going to develop a collaborative activity about attention to diversity both to learn about this topic and to experience how is it to teach in cooperative groups through a collaborative methodology.
So, first of all, we've been looking at the documentation Miguel posted it (both about contents and about types of collaborative activities).
Here you have the slides about collaborative activities (I found many of them really useful and helped me to clarify some previous ideas I had about them). It also helped me to learn how to use box (a space in the cloud) and how to share its content... Here you have my first try:



You can find very well developed the information we had related to attention to diversity in Almu's blog.

We developed an hour class about the topic "Special Education Needs provision within Mainstream Education(Students with specific need of ed. support)"

First of all we split the class in 5 cooperative teams (The ordinary ones for this classroom)

We designed 3 activities:
- A warming up activity 'At a glance'  in which we wanted our mates to get in touch with the topic and to recover previous knowledge if any. In order to do so, we split the information we were going to work with in four chunks. The aim of this activity was that they had a first glance at the contents so they were able to answer some questions whose answer was on the papers hanged. We presented the activity as a little contest so that the dynamic feeling of it helped to enhance motivation.

- For the second activity, the core activity of the session, we chose a 'group of experts' activity, to reinforce the methodology we learned as a students and put it into practice as teachers to have a better perspective of its strengths and weaknesses. The aim of this activity was to work deeply on the contents and learn how to tell what you've learned so the rest of your group learns it as well. In order to do so, we asked them to write questions about it once they shared their information.

- The last activity 'The number' is thought as a summing-up activity. Using the questions written in the previous activity we will try to get into a question-answer contest among the groups to see what we have learnt, serving as self-evaluation of the knowledge acquired.

Here you have in a box presentation the activities further explained as well as the questions we asked during the first activity.

During the activity we tried to assess how each group was developing the activities. In collaborative learning it is not only the result which is been assessed but also the process. We tried to assess individual and group attitude towards the activities we proposed, and how they were working on them (performance, understanding, involvement...).

After the activity we asked the rest of the groups to send us an evaluation of our activities in order to see how they perceived them and what could be improved for next time. We also had a meeting to self-evaluate the development of the activities. Here you have our rubrics for each group and our self-assessment:




Self-reflection:

I've learnt a lot with this activity. To be honest, in this case, the weakest part of my learning was, at first, the content part, because I turned an expert on my chunk and because of the rush of the week I didn't learnt that much from the others... (Later on, I read the whole information). I really enjoyed the part of planning the activities, as I said I learnt more about cooperative learning (which I'm really keen on) and I had the opportunity to see the problems of the activities we planned when put into practice.

We thought the class was going to get involved with the first activity, and some of them did it but not all... There was a component of movement, a little bit of competition  to help them to wake up... But something was missing... Maybe, the chunks of information were too long, maybe the instructions of the activity were not exposed clear enough... Maybe some of them just didn't want to participate at all... What to do to motivate those without intrinsic motivation at all? I think this is one of the great questions of this degree.

Another thing to learn from, was the timing... How different does the time run in our heads and in reallity... As it uses to happen, we didn't calculate the time properly. In the second activity, one of the strongest points from my perspective is that we asked them to write questions down instead of reproducing contents. I think I learn much more through questions than through their answers... In order to make a smart question, it is required to understand what has been read and to relate this information.

The third activity was an activity that allowed us to know what was learned and what not. We thought that the fact that they were the ones making questions (instead of pre-thought questions from our part) would motivate them to get involved in the activity because they were their peers who were asking. It worked on most of the class...
I think this kind of activities were all the process is developed, planning-development-assessment of an activity is really worthwhile because it allows us to experience in the role of a teacher different ways to proceed in the class.

From an ICT point of view, with this activity I've deepen in how to hang and share contents in the cloud. I used to have dropbox but only to share files with people who also had the program. Now I've learnt how to embed the content I wanted to share. As always, self-learning of ICT, for me is quite hard. It is a process of trial and error... But I have to admit that the consequences are great. At least in this case.