Week 2 - Digital Collaboration 21st Century Skills

Reflection:Which 21st Century skills related area of your practice would you like to focus on in your Assessment 1? Why? Would your students agree? How do you know?
Collaboration
Knowledge construction
Self-regulation
The Use of ICT for learning
Skilled Communication
Real-world problem-solving and innovation

The key findings in the ITL Research were that innovative teaching supports students’ development of the skills that will help them thrive in future life and work. However, students’ opportunities to develop these skills are typically scarce and uneven, both within and across the sample of schools in the study.

The skill that I feel would help develop my practice and which I feel needs work on is Collaboration. Collaboration is encouraged in my classroom and children are often working on tasks together. However, I feel that they are more cooperating rather than collaborating as they do not have shared responsibility. When asking my students what they thought collaboration was, most of them thought it was just working together, helping each other or doing the same thing. A lot were not even able to tell me what collaboration was. This shows me that although I thought that we collaborated in the classroom, that in fact the children didn't know what we were doing and why we were doing it in that way. I need to construct a way of making the class more collaborative where activities require students to make decisions together and have shared responsibility.