Communication is a necessity when dealing with collaboration. You cannot collaborate without communicating. When you have a team in place for a student, for example, an IEP team, everyone comes together to reach a special goal. We communicate our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions and share them with one another. We pay attention to the verbal and nonverbal ways others communicate, as well as their perceptions of things. We have to be open to a variety of different ideas and beliefs, therefore we must communicate to figure out how we are going to come together for this common goal. Although we may not like others forms of communication it is very important to respect everyone’s opinions, use effective listening skills. Ultimately, our students cannot be fully successful without the collaboration process, and further more we cannot be successful in that collaboration practice without communicating how we are going to help all of our students succeed.
Our school district has a collaboration period worked into our bell schedule once a week. Whether or not I agree with this is one thing, but what we do during this time is something else. As a department we communicate with one another on student goals and objectives, as well as assessments and achievements. Everyone in my department has a different frame of reference, but we work together, listen to one another and do the best we can to come up with lessons and practices that will allow for success for all of our students. We communicate everyday, without that we would isolate ourselves and our students would ultimately be the ones that suffer.
I personally think having a collaboration period in your schedule would be greatly beneficial. This guarantees time to talk with other and communicate. I know it not voluntary like it should be but you do get that time to collaborate which might be difficult to do otherwise.
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