Collaborative Learning Project
Project Director: Stuart Scott, 17 Barford Street, Islington, LONDON N1 OQB Telephone +44 (0) 20 7226 8885 Fax available on phone request. Email: stuart.scott@collaborativelearning.org
For regular visitors here are Quicklinks to:
This website tries to be a "three clicks and you're there" site. It is designed for speedy access rather than impressive appearance! Most of the site contains teaching activities to promote talk, which we hope you will adapt to your needs, and/or use as templates for producing your own teaching activities.
We want to provide interesting ways for children to learn in classes, where many different languages are spoken, and where children are learning English while accessing the whole curriculum.
Our aim is to provide examples of group talk activities that will benefit all children, while at the same time provide scaffolding for learning English. Collaborative activities are vital for children learning English, but at the same time other learners benefit in many ways. They are good for developing sustained shared thinking, and also help retention of information through pleasurable repetition. Children new to English need exposure to visually stimulating collaborative talk activities in short sessions throughout their learning if they are going to be able to draw on their prior knowledge and skills.
We are now putting more illustrations into the more recently posted activities so they will be a little slower to download, but they will be much more accessible for new arrivals. We are beginning to produce summaries of activities (Quicklooks!) on single pages to make it easier for you to get a flavour of the resource without having to download the complete activity. For all the teaching activities and the quicklooks you will need Acrobat Reader.
If this is the first time you have visited this site please go here for a short introduction to the project. And please browse through the QUICKLOOKS. The NEWSLETTER usually contains information on the most recently posted activities, information on workshops we are running and links to interesting research. We are concentrating on posting activities for schools encountering new arrivals to English, and beginning to include versions in other languages with translated or transliterated. We would argue that five or ten minutes every hour or so during the school day of collaborative work within mainstream classrooms will do a lot more to help new arrivals than an hour of language teaching in isolation. We hope you will be interested in producing more collaborative activities to add to ours?
Click here to find downloadable collaborative learning activities available on the site . They cover all curriculum areas and all key stages including foundation (early years). Can we encourage you to join our network of teachers who are posting activities on this and linked sites. You can find lists of activities (storyprops and games for infants and early years) that we can't currently make available online here and which are available by post at no cost to schools. No time to download whole activities at the moment?? Then take a Quick Look at these single pages which will give you a flavour of some of our recently posted activities.
Description and history of project and a list of commonly asked questions and answers (in html) or questions and answers in leaflet form in pdf about collaborative learning. Booklet on collaborative learning by Steve Cooke.
Would you like to support our work? We only rely on colleagues to spread the word since the project has no funding for publicity! Please download our little publicity leaflet or our even smaller publicity leaflet and hand it out to colleagues and at courses and workshops.
Below you will find links to websites of local authority ethnic minority achievement teams with collaborative materials either online or for sale by post. If you are working in an authority that disseminates collaborative resources, please tell us and we will add a link!
UK links to organisations that promote collaborative learning to raise ethnic minority achievement and improve access to the curriculum for learners of English.:
-National (England) Association for Language Development in the Curriculum: (NALDIC).
-Northern (between Trent and Tyne) Association of Support Services for Ethnic Achievement. (NASSEA)
-East and West Midlands Association of Support Services for Ethnic Achievement MASSEA.
Both MASSEA and NASSEA sites are under construction.
The Committee that plans the yearly EAL conference in Scotland (SATEAL) is currently renewing its site.
OTHER USEFUL LINKS:
Letterbox Library celebrating equality and diversity in the best children's books.
INTERNATIONAL LINKS THAT SUPPORT OUR WORK:
International Association for the study of Cooperation in Education (IASCE) with a lot of other links to resources and sites mainly in the USA: http://www.IASCE.net.
If you know of any sites that share our vision please let us know and we will add them to our links.