Instructional Problem
The Tennessee Department of Education (2014) states that 70% of Tennessee Virtual Academy’s 8th grade students report rarely working in small groups or pairs to discuss written work. This is 15% lower than Union County, 39% lower than the district of East Tennessee, and 46% lower than the state (see Table 4). Toten (1991) claims that students who engage in dialogue by actively collaborating and debating ideas within a peer-group are more likely to become critical-thinkers both in and outside the educational setting. With the push for Common Core standards, critical thinking skills will be more important than ever within our school systems.
Despite commitment and dedication, teachers at Tennessee Virtual Academy, a fully-online school, have difficulty facilitating significant and meaningful academic peer collaboration during live, synchronous sessions. The school, which uses Blackboard Collaborate to host online sessions, has not provided official or mandatory training for teachers on effective group interactions in the virtual setting. Now closing its third year in operation, observation and survey feedback suggest that teachers randomly assign students to groups and do not prepare students for effective collaboration.
Current Conditions and Desired Conditions
Current Conditions
The current teaching and learning environment at Tennessee Virtual Academy does not consistently provide meaningful and dynamic teamwork between students in the virtual classroom. Over 80% of students surveyed believe that they are randomly assigned to groups (see Table 1), and only 33% of teachers surveyed believe they have spent sufficient class time training students to collaborate effectively (see Table 2).
Observations of teach...
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...ion of the effective use of breakout rooms as well as a student satisfaction survey.
Goal of Instruction
Given company laptops, Blackboard Collaborate tools, and Microsoft PowerPoint, Tennessee Virtual Academy teachers will plan and implement lessons on a weekly basis that provide purposeful peer interaction among students during synchronous sessions with a satisfaction rating of 3.0 or better as scored by a proficiency rubric.
Works Cited
Tennessee Department of Education (2014). 2012-1013 Responses to Writing Survey.
Totten, S. (1991). Cooperative learning: A guide to research. New York: Garland.
Beckman, M. (1990). Collaborative Learning: Preparation for the Workplace and Democracy. College Teaching, 38(4), 128-133.
Slavin, R.(1980). Cooperative Learning. Review of Educational Research, 50(2), 315-342. Retrieved May 8, 2014 from the Wilson Web database.
Hartman, H. (2002). Scaffolding & cooperative learning. Human learning and instruction. New York: City College of City University of New York.
Wischnowski, M. W., Salmon, S. J., & Eaton, K. (2004). Evaluating co-teaching as a means for
Weiner, Harvey S. “Collaborative Learning in the Classroom: A Guide to Evaluation.” The Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook. Eds. Gary Tate and Corbett. New York, NY: Oxford UP: 1988. 238-247.
Online learning is now a reality, with distributed learning and blended learning becoming more widely used in Higher Education (Whatley, 1999). Online learning has many advantages and disadvantages. Teamwork in online environments is becoming a widely used tool, whether it is in business or education. A team working together has more and better input than individuals working alone. This results in better ideas and decisions and higher quality output. Virtual teams are a good way to enable teamwork in situations where people are not sitting in the same physical office at the same time. The effective team-building requires the combination of clear team goals, empowerment, atmosphere of trust within the team, authentic participation of every member of team, innovative approach to work and ability to manage risks, proper leadership and ability to make the constructive changes.
Classroom management plays an important role in effective teaching by providing a desirable environment which promotes better learning and student growth. The most important effect that classroom management has on student behavior is that it promotes better learning because students can better focus when their environment is free from distraction and conflict. When a teacher provides a well-organized and controlled environment, student’s academics interest and performance increase while behavioral issues decreased (Pope, 2010). One classroom management technique I plan to use in my future classroom setting will include the use of cooperative learning. According to Maher (2010), cooperation learning leads to higher group and individual achievement, higher-quality reasoning strategies, more frequent transfer of these from the group to individual members, greater metacognitive skills, and more new ideas and problem-solving. Students will be assigned heterogeneous groups with a mixture of high achievers with low achievers. Groups will also be created to ensure diversity between gender and ethnicity.
Cooperative learning is a powerful classroom strategy which is not merely involving students working as groups. The essential feature of this approach is that the success of one student helps other students to be successful (Slavin, 1989). Students are concerned about the performance of all the group members; held individually accountable for their learning and given feedback on their performance. This helps other group members know to help and
The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) helps learning associations persistently enhance quality, scale, and expansiveness of their online projects as indicated by their own unmistakable missions, with the goal that instruction will turn into a piece of ordinary life, available and moderate for anybody, anyplace, whenever, in a wide assortment of controls. Sloan-C underpins the cooperative sharing of information and compelling practices to enhance online training in learning adequacy, access, moderateness for learners and suppliers, and understudy and staff
Rosini B. A. (2010). The Effects of Cooperative Learning Methods on Achievement, Retention, and Attitudes of Home Economics Students in North Carolina. Journal of Vocational and Technical Education. Volume 13, (2) 33-67.
Technology is rapidly advancing in the world. People’s everyday lives are being bombarded by technology. Now schools are even being bombarded by technology. Schools are learning to embrace technology for the benefit of the students. One of the new ways schools are using technology is with virtual schools. Virtual, or online, schools are schools were education is learned through the Internet. They provide a different learning environment than the regular “cookie-cutter” classroom, but should there even be virtual schools? The answer to this common question is YES. Virtual schools provide a wide range of benefits for education.
Collaborative learning is a situation where two or more people attempt to learn something together. Dillenbourg, P. (1999). Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, (born in 1986), introduced his theory that, human development—child development as well as the development of all human kind—is the result of interactions between people and their social environments. What this states is that the development of a “higher education” is the product of comparing and contrasting ideas of others ultimately to conclude a solution to a problem as a whole or group. Everyone’s input in a collaborative situation will play a role in final solution.
The popularity and availability of online schooling, also referred to as virtual schools, cyber schools, e-learning, and distance learning, is growing rapidly throughout the U.S. I think the idea of virtual schools is wonderful, especially for those who are home bound or have medical conditions. Students at virtual schools can learn at any time and any place about any number of subjects, which is quite convenient. Students from rural areas can have the wide selection of courses usually only available to students in large suburban or urban schools.
Clark, T. (2001). Virtual schools: Trends and issues: A study of virtual schools in the United States. Retrieved October 18, 2003, from http://www.wested.org/online_pubs/virtualschools.pdf
Collaborative learning is an educational approach that involves groups of learners working together to reach a consensus through negotiation to solve a problem, complete a task, or create a product (Bruffee, 1993). Learning occurs through active engagement among peers, wherein the main characteristics of collaborative learning are: a common task or activity; small group learning, co-operative behaviour; interdependence; and individual responsibility and accountability (Lejeune, 2003).
All of our lives, we have gone through school learning with many other students in a classroom, and using books. But what if things were to change? What if instead of getting up to go to school, we simply had to just turn our computers on. Virtual Education is becoming a new way to teach and learn. Using computers, students can interact with other students and instructors, go to a history lecture with people all across the world, and even dissect frogs.
In contrast, in virtual learning environment, there would be a danger of procrastination among students. Moreover, students will not collaborate with each other because all learning is online, so they will feel isolation.