Collaborative Teaching/Learning Activities

To ‘collaborate’ means to “to work with someone else for a special purpose”. This course focuses on designing teaching/learning activities that stimulate students to work with their student peers in applying the knowledge they have obtained through traditional teaching/learning activities such as lectures, through their own search efforts and from their own life experience.

While traditional teaching/learning activities are generally passive in nature, collaborative (participatory) teaching/learning activities promote active student engagement. We have used ‘collaborative teaching/learning activities’ in all Training and Professional Development pedagogy courses, and we trust that all faculty participants have seen how effective these kind of activities, especially collaborative ‘groupwork’, can be.

Collaborative teaching/learning activities are based on the premise that people learn better by doing activities that more closely match the way knowledge is used in real life as well as by working with their peers in a supportive learning environment. At the same time, these activities better prepare students to participate more fully in their studies, in their future employment and as citizens of Afghanistan.

This course will provide the participants with the latest thinking in university groupwork design, specifically how

    * groupwork is connected with and works to address course learning goals
    * groupwork fits into unit plans and the overall course plan
    * to successfully introduce groupwork to their students
    * to promote the skills necessary for their students to conduct groupwork
    * to facilitate the groupwork process
    * to assess groupwork products
    * to provide closure to groupwork activities


In order to accomplish these goals, the course will take the participants through a step-by-step process of creating a longer-term groupwork that necessitates student groups using higher-order and critical thinking skills to generate a well-defined groupwork product.
 

The participants’ course assignments are published on this website to promote sharing of ideas about the course topics. All work is the intellectual property of the writer. As such, any copying of this work, even short sections of the work, is theft and is forbidden.

Participants in TPD courses can read these assignments and communicate with the authors by email or by the course blog. In addition, participants can submit drafts of their assignments to the course trainers or fellow participants for review and comment. Participants are encouraged to revise and improve their work based on this type of communication.

However, all written work submitted by participants as individual assignments must be the original work of the participant. If any participant submits work that is completely or partially copied from any source, they will be failed in the course and their case will be submitted to university authorities for disciplinary action.

If there is any question in the participant’s minds as to what constitutes ‘plagiarism’, they should ask their course trainer, submitting their written work and noting where they got their ideas from. The course trainer will inform the participant if what they wrote is in violation of this policy.

As teachers and participants in pedagogic training, it is important to share ideas and work together at times during the course. However, for individual assignments, this freedom to read and discuss other people’s work comes with the responsibility to act responsibly and honesty.

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