REPORTS & STUDIES

August tertiary, 2021

Collaboration:
Partnering With Colleagues, Families, and Caregivers to Promote Educatee Success

Female teacher is crouched in front of girl's desk, pointing toward board

What Is Collaboration?

Collaboration is an effective tool that allows general educators, special educators, learning specialists, administrators, and other stakeholders to work together to meet the needs of students. Collaboration is particularly important to sustain inclusive settings. No single educator should be responsible for holding the expertise in the infinite presentations of learner variability. Further, students work with multiple adults within a school building. Collaboration creates condom conditions for students and educators to share knowledge and collectively trouble-solve. The main purposes of collaboration include: identifying and sharing effective bookish, beliefs, and social-emotional instructional practices, ensuring that practices are consequent across all providers, and ensuring that the students benefit from those practices.

Effective collaboration depends on good communication practices. Examples of high-impact collaboration practices include: collaborative lesson planning across providers (peculiarly in a multi-tiered system of supports), collaboration with parents and caregivers to extend the teaching and learning process "across the bong," and collaboration with student back up personnel like related-service providers and paraprofessionals.

Collaboration will be a key classroom practice when you lot render to in-person learning. Nosotros know that students will be returning to school with varying needs, including bookish, behavioral, and social-emotional. To finer meet these needs, collaboration with students' previous teachers and support staff will assistance ensure that students begin the school twelvemonth on the right pes. Consider implementing "hand-off" meetings — even quick ones — with your students' previous teachers. Ask your students' former teachers to place students who did exceedingly well during the pandemic, as well as students for whom the last yr was a claiming. Asking last year's teachers about their successful strategies for instruction and engagement should be a high priority. This do can inform how you approach relationship-edifice and differentiation of content.

Collaboration with families and caregivers volition also be disquisitional for this school twelvemonth. Families and caregivers took an active role in their child's education during the COVID-19 pandemic. They assisted with technology needs, supported their kid'south learning of material, and provided social-emotional support.

Make a program to acquire from your students' families and caregivers with like "hand-off" meetings or empathy interviews. Seek to empathize what did and didn't work last year. You could even include students in these conversations, as they will have the most insight to share. Early collaboration with families will help constitute lines of communication and build positive relationships for the school twelvemonth.

Collaboration supports all students — including the 1 in v with learning and attention bug. Several studies have shown that students with disabilities in schools with collaborative culture outperform similar students in schools without these structures.1  Collaboration tin bring together teachers with different perspectives and unlike cognition to run into learner variability. For example, a general education teacher collaborating with a literacy specialist can efficiently identify strategies to support students with reading abilities that are above or beneath grade level. Similarly, collaboration can exist a tool for creating consistent learning experiences. All students, and especially students with disabilities, benefit from consistent implementation of differentiation strategies, accommodations, and modifications to meet learners where they are in the classroom.

Why Collaboration Meets the Needs of the Post-COVID-19 Classroom

This jump, NCLD and Boston Academy'due south CERES Constitute surveyed over 2,400 teachers. We asked almost their perceptions and feelings on the school year and how their students handled learning during the pandemic, particularly those with learning and attention challenges. We heard feedback on lessons learned throughout the pandemic, including what teachers want to go on for next yr and what they promise would change.

Ane fundamental finding was that collaboration was identified as a key strategy for meeting the needs of students with learning and attention challenges. Indeed, consistent and structured times to run across to analyze data (e.g., leave tickets, summative assessments, behavior logs) and collaborative problem-solving is important for teachers and for students. It can place pupil assets, which can be applied beyond multiple settings. Collaborative times are besides an opportunity to identify student needs and ensure that the correct interventions are implemented.

Skills for Constructive Collaboration

Effective collaboration goes beyond having the time and space to meet with colleagues. Retrieve near how y'all'd set your students upward for successful peer collaboration. Y'all'd make up one's mind what's needed ahead of time, explicitly teaching those foundational skills with modeling and reinforcement. As professionals, we might non need that level of intensive back up, but there are skills that nosotros need to use to maximize collaborative time. Below are suggestions to improve your meeting facilitation and participation.

Skill Get-To Moves
Preparedness
  • Identify a facilitator. This person may be the team leader, or you may opt to rotate facilitation responsibilities.
  • Prepare an agenda ahead of fourth dimension and identify meeting goals.
  • Communicate pre-work, ideally no more than xxx minutes' worth, to maximize collaboration.
Active Listening
  • Be present. Silence prison cell phones, close laptops, and focus only on the meeting agenda and goals.
  • Allow others to fully finish their thoughts.
  • Follow upward with questions.
Summarizing
  • As the meeting goes on, summarize what you're hearing (or call back you're hearing!) from your colleagues.
  • Every bit the meeting concludes, summarize next steps, ownership, and any deadlines for follow-through. Identify any unresolved topics for the adjacent meeting. Don't forget to revisit these adjacent steps during hereafter meetings to ensure follow-through.
Questioning
  • Approach colleagues with an inquiry mindset. Ask questions, particularly open-ended and clarifying ones.
  • Check your ain understanding of your colleagues' views past paraphrasing.
Delivering
  • Deliver ideas and solutions with evidence.
Integrating
  • Synthesize colleagues' ideas to arrive at an actionable solution.
  • Use input and feedback to strengthen initial ideas.
Empathizing
  • Presume positive intent of others.
  • Ensure that anybody'south voice is equally heard and that everyone is contributing.

Continue in mind that these practices also extend to working collaboratively with families and caregivers. Effective collaboration can help you leverage your families' avails — their groundwork knowledge, interests, and culture. As we saw throughout the pandemic, families play a key role in supporting their children'due south instruction. We must partner with families to help their children and to ensure that all students attain.

Collaboration and Effective Progress Monitoring

In schools implementing a multi-tiered organization of supports, collaboration and progress monitoring become hand-in-hand. As we've noted, teachers should not work in isolation. It's important to distribute problem-solving opportunities amid full general educators, special educators, learning specialists, administrators, and other stakeholders to ameliorate student outcomes.

As we look toward the new schoolhouse yr, we know students will return with varying needs. They will accept had varying degrees of success with learning experiences during the pandemic. You should employ the beginning of the school year to build relationships with students and to administer diagnostic assessments, like universal screeners. Having a baseline of educatee performance is critical for knowing if students are making adequate progress throughout the twelvemonth — and for chop-chop identifying the students who take foundational skill gaps.

With this baseline data, yous'll want to monitor students' progress in their response to your daily didactics and whatsoever interventions you implement. You lot can do this with exit tickets at the end of lessons or through weekly assessments. What's of import is that you're collecting data and analyzing it to chop-chop adjust your instruction. For example, at the end of each lesson, requite students a short determinative assessment aligned to the objective. With just a few items, you can make up one's mind which students mastered the objective and which need additional time or even a unlike instructional approach. Depending on the responses, y'all might build in additional review at the tiptop of your side by side lesson for your whole grade, or create a small group lesson for a select grouping of students. This type of analysis is ripe for collaboration. Check in with your grade-level colleague to share ideas on adjusting instruction, or tap into your paraprofessional to back up a modest group. Collaboration can be quick conversations and even so result in constructive adjacent steps.

If students are non making progress with this type of responsive educational activity and collaboration, you'll want to use your school's collaborative structures, similar a educatee back up team, to become additional ideas for how to best support their needs. This step is crucial for intervening effectively and ensuring that students who require peculiarly designed instruction go the correct services.

Learn More than

High-Level Practices in Special Education: Collaboration (Council for Exceptional Children)

Downloadable 15-page chapter from the CEC's larger publication. Provides research syntheses for special education teachers on:

  • Collaborating with other professionals
  • Organizing and facilitating effective meetings with professionals and families
  • Collaborating with families

Collaborating With Families (IRIS Center)

Learning module designed to assistance teachers build positive relationships with families of students with learning issues. Multimedia resource and templates cover such topics as:

  • Recognizing that all families are different
  • Understanding the emotions exhibited past the parents of children with disabilities
  • Showing respect to parents
  • Treating parents as equal partners
  • Providing parents with meaningful information nigh their child's and the school'due south functioning

Distance Learning Toolkit: Key Practices to Back up Students Who Learn Differently (Understood)

A toolkit to help educators meet the needs of all students during distance learning. It includes boosted ideas for collaborating with colleagues, families, and caregivers.

A Note to School, District, and Country Leaders

We heard from our surveys and educator focus groups that teachers want, and value, collaborative planning time. It's upwardly to school and district leadership to create — and protect — this time. To advance the operation of the 1 in 5, we need to create more inclusive environments and promote inclusive instruction. This requires time, infinite, and back up for constructive collaboration. A all-time practice is to place these collaborative times within your schedule first, and then plan around these times.two

Nosotros recommend strategic planning for ensuring that collaborative planning happens. Some districts opt to shorten one school day a week to ensure uninterrupted collaboration times.iii Other districts put more instructor work days into their calendars, including at the offset and end of the school-year. Some districts use "early release days" for teacher collaboration. Ane of the positive outcomes of virtual learning during the pandemic is that teachers used collaborative platforms like Zoom to collaborate with educational activity teams. As chiefly, teachers reported that the utilise of remote collaboration methods similar FaceTime significantly increased habitation-school collaboration. Teachers reported using these methods to demonstrate with parents constructive academic, behavior and social emotional strategies "across the bell."

For more ideas on implementing effective collaboration, check out Forrard Together: A School Leader's Guide to Creating Inclusive Schools for a comprehensive guide on implementing this strategy, likewise every bit others that will meet the needs of the 1 in 5, and all students. Boosted school, commune, and state-level policy recommendations to support educators can be found in this resources.

Acknowledgments

Author: Lindsay DeHartchuck, M.A.
Expert Reviewers: George 1000. Batsche, Ed.D. and Christina Cipriano, Ph.D.
Teacher Contributor: MaryEllen Noonan, Thousand.A., Ed.S.

Footnotes

  1. McLeskey, J., Barringer, M-D., Billingsley, B., et al. (2017, January). High-leverage practices in special education instruction. Council for Infrequent Children & CEEDAR Center.
  2. Anderson, J. (2019, September 17). The gift of teacher time. Usable Knowledge. https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/19/09/souvenir-teacher-fourth dimension
  3. Saenz-Armstrong, P. (2021, June x). A look at districts' planning and collaboration policies for their teachers. National Quango on Teacher Quality. https://www.nctq.org/weblog/A-look-at-districts-planning-and-collaboration-policies-for-their-teachers
  • Forward Together:
    Pandemic Lessons for Effective Teaching Practices
  • Key Findings
  • Collaboration:
    Partnering With Colleagues, Families, and Caregivers to Promote Educatee Success
  • Flexible Grouping:
    A Responsive Strategy to Meet Educatee Needs in Real Fourth dimension
  • Positive Behavior Strategies:
    An Approach for Engaging and Motivating Students
  • School, District, and State-Level Policy Recommendations

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