The Power of Teacher Collaboration Classes
In this blog post, we will explore how educators can utilize collaboration strategies to set up SpacesEDU for the weeks, months, even entire academic year(s!) ahead! By leveraging our co-teacher accounts, spaces and activities features, teachers can share their ideas, effectively plan their lessons and assessments, and align their goals with broader district objectives. With the creation of a Teacher Collaboration Class, teachers are able to pool resources effectively to create activities that can later be used directly within their SpacesEDU classes (with a single click)!
Step 1: Organize the Collaborative Session
District and/or school leads should first designate groups of educators from each grade and/or subject area, with a maximum of 10 teachers per group. The leads should then schedule a collaborative plan and/or session. Note that teachers don’t necessarily have to come together within one meeting, time, or place - the collaboration class can be built upon throughout the year, anytime, anywhere! They can certainly make use of the Messages feature within the class to communicate throughout.
Let participating teachers know that this session is intended to plan activities for certain grades, subjects, units, and/or other pertinent district goals and objectives. With that, teachers should therefore come prepared with a set number of activities and/or lesson plans (including SpacesEDU resources available to them!) With Curriculum Tags, teachers can be assigned subject- and/or tag-specific activities- so that together, all curricular objectives can be achieved.
Step 2: Create the Collaboration Classes & Invite Co-Teachers
Once the participants have been determined, set up each collaborative class. Depending on your district’s rostering method, this can be created manually within SpacesEDU, or by completing a CSV Class Import. If you’ve created the class manually, send out invitations to co-teachers to join!
Once the class has been created, be sure to also add the pertinent curriculum tags according to the subject and/or grade of participating teachers.
Step 3: Create Activities
Time to start creating! Once the teachers have accepted their invitations and joined the collaborative class, have them navigate to the Activities tab to set up activities for the year! Take a look at the following resources on how to create activities:
Step 4: Leverage the Activity Portal
Once all the activities have been created, have the teachers navigate into their student classes. When creating a new activity within this class, teachers will find the Activity Portal with ALL of the activities created within the Collaboration Class! Here, they can simply click Use Activity, and schedule the activity for their own classroom, like so:
The great thing about the Activity Portal, is that all the activities created will be available to educators to use for years to come (even after this year’s classes have been archived!) With that, the work you do today will truly save you time in the long run.
Collaborative Conclusion
And there you have it - all teacher activities planned for the year! By harnessing the power of collaboration, and leveraging the flexible features of SpacesEDU, teachers can effectively plan for a seamless and productive academic year ahead.
