Collaborative Teaching Project #1

This year, the Math and Physics online teachers at LearnQuebec are going to try co-teaching! I and two colleagues - Kerry Cule and Andy Ross, who both teach Physics, have decided to collaborate on the first unit, which is vectors. The content is pretty much the same in both of our courses, so we figured what the heck. At the very least, we'll be more efficient, and at best, we'll be able to provide richer experiences for our students.

One of the challenges is that we can never be in each other's classes, because our schedules conflict. Oh yes, and one of us lives in Montreal, one in Ottawa, and the other in New Brunswick. Another challenge is that not all of our students are in both Math and Physics. Most are, but we of course don't want those students who aren't to be at a disadvantage, so we decided to try it as follows:

Week 1: We split up the topics, and we've each created one recorded lesson, which all groups will watch asynchronously. Then, during our classes we'll do activities that put the concepts in the framework for our own subjects. 

Week 2: Similar, but we're thinking of doing videos in which we all appear, just to make things more fun. one idea is to have the teachers doing a tug of war, to illustrate vector addition. That'll also be challenging considering we don't live anywhere near each other - I think Camtasia will have to provide some magic for us there.

We'll see how it goes. So far, the most challenging thing has been finding a way to represent the joint schedules so that each teacher can immediately know which of the their students is in which other class, if any. I've made a colour-coded one that makes use of every possible colour Word's got.

At some point, I'm hoping we'll collaborate, at get our kids to collaborate also, in the spirit of my One Big Idea that I wrote about toward the end of last year.

Here goes nothing!