Collaborative Departmental Teaching: Gateway to Personalized Learning

Collaborative Departmental Teaching: Gateway to Personalized Learning

Marc J. D’Amico, MA

Michael J. Marotto, PhD

In this second essay in the series of commentary on the promotion of the Collaborative Departmental Teaching (CDT) model for the elementary classroom, we explain how the model provides a practical foundation for personalized learning. As with most contemporary concepts in public education that claim to be innovative and progressive, personalized learning has a number of variants to its definition, and therefore, to its understanding by the teachers who assume the daily responsibility for the design, implementation, and assessment of individually centered learning strategies for their students. Inherent in our vision for CDT is that an individual student-approach to teaching is a natural extension of departmentalization, and it further enhances the goals of a personalized elementary experience: skill-based knowledge, individual discovery, and subject mastery.

As we stated previously, subject-specific, specialized teaching supports personalized instruction with a discipline-intensive focus that aligns developmentally with the individual learning needs of the student. And this approach where learning experiences are personalized for each student demands that individualization be based on data, formative and summative results to provide teachers with as clear an ability and skill profile as possible. CDT, with its subject-specific approach to mastery, gives the strategy of individualization a natural head start since the teacher has a greater opportunity, and professional motivation, to analyze data more in-depth and to apply that information more consistently from lesson to lesson. Departmentalization also facilitates the use of an enhanced, individualized approach to learning, as a result, blended environment is most appropriate. This type of environment expects the intentional, blended use of physical and digital tools and resources (technology) that can be used to support teachers as they seek to sharpen their subject-area focus and to individualize the learning experience simultaneously. Also, personalized learning that derives from departmental teaching can better accommodate students who can add to the individualized learning experience by making their own choices about adapting curriculum to their own learning needs. A fifth grade math teacher, for example, can better assess the effectiveness of overall objectives for the grade and of individual learning needs of the students as the result of having contact with students from all or multiple sections in the grade. We must add here that a teacher’s expertise in her selected discipline increases measurably throughout the grade when CDT is practiced, and it is the reciprocal energy from this teaching expertise that inspires students to set individual, personal goals and to achieve peak subject-specific performance.

It is evident to the teaching team advocating and implementing departmentalization that students benefit from experiencing different teaching styles since they become skilled in adapting to them in a variety of learning contexts. Exposure to different teaching approaches, regardless of the subject taught, offers students an experiential foundation for the transition required between subjects, projects, and daily tasks and, even more significant, for a successful adaptation to the structure of a middle school model. Learning contexts – primarily, the dynamic in the room between the teacher and her students, the seating configurations, the proximity and association with classmates, the classroom itself, – are negotiated learning environments, each with its own ethnographic import. Stated directly: the more student exposure to a variety of learning contexts, the better. The CDT model allows teachers to exploit these prescriptive and designed learning environments to stimulate student discovery, confidence, and ultimately, independence. Structured independence -- strategies intentionally designed to promote students’ self-discovery of imbedded themes -- remains the goal, a developmental result to which scores of middle school teachers will attest, and the learning opportunities that result will empower students to become more emotionally stable. It also becomes clear to those of us who take the time to observe the CDT model’s implementation, with an evaluator’s knowledge and insight, that students develop a self-motivation through independent thinking, creative discovery, and peer collaboration, cognitive motivators that are the signature student behaviors resulting from CDT. To the informed visitor to the CDT classroom, look for the following student behaviors: practicing what the teacher has instructed to develop a personalized environment; shifting thought direction, from compliance to creativity; transferring skills, across contexts and content; discovering purpose and meaning; communicating their findings, in a variety of formats; reflecting on process; self-assessing of their learning.

CDT Highlights:

Students

* Experience different teaching styles and adapt to them in a variety of learning contexts;

* Develop and experience through context a structured independence;

* Encounter opportunities to become more emotionally stable;

* Develop self-motivation through independent thinking and discovery and peer collaboration.

* Exhibit positive learning classroom behaviors.