Collaborative lesson planning

In my online class, Teaching the Struggling Adolescent Reader, I'm thrilled with the collaborative nature of the class. Participating teachers work in pairs. One designs the lesson, including pretest, lesson and posttest; the other implements it. In addition to the feedback the teacher who is implementing the lesson provides, this teacher is also responsible for writing up the final case study.

What has impressed me most is the dialogue that is going on. Before the teachers could design the lesson, they needed to have assessment and observational data on the student involved in the case study. Teachers used a variety of sources to pinpoint the needs of the struggling reader. In addition, the designer of the material needed to have pretest information to begin the lesson planning. This often necessitated a few rewrites in order to get at the level the student could begin the lesson.
Often in online classes as well as regular classes, an instructor does not see the planning and the discussion that goes on in formulating these materials, often one only sees the end product. In this class it is evident.

This program is part of a collaborative effort established through the University of Georgia at Athens through a Carnegie grant. The slant in this project is to teach struggling readers to use researched literacy strategies to help students in understanding their reading.

The feedback sessions are particularly informative: the instructor sees what the students said and wrote, how the students used the materials, what support the student needed and what problems arose during the lesson. This then begins the dialogue in planning the next lesson.

One can see how a community of practice could grow out of this model if used at the school level.

Website for more on this:
http://www.tc.columbia.edu/lessonstudy/articles_papers.html