Collaborative student support

Collaborative teaching to support students in difficulties

18-22 March 2024, Berlin, Germany
28 April - 2 May 2025, Gouda, Netherlands

About the course

This course is for teachers, head teachers and school counsellors who are in the process of implementing, developing or improving the teamwork of teachers or collaborative teaching practice. We strongly encourage more teachers/counsellors from the same school to participate together to facilitate the learning transfer after the course.

Collaborative teaching involves two or more teachers working together to lead, instruct and mentor groups of students, focusing on the 21st century key competences (such as collaboration, creative and innovative thinking, critical thinking and communication), and often working cross disciplinary. Collaborative teaching/ professional learning communities among teachers can enhance students’ performance and well being. This course focuses specifically on supporting students in difficulties through building a reflective practice among teachers, where teachers maintain an interest in the perspective of the student as well as curiosity around the context that maintains the problems, and their own role in this.

The course will give the teachers tools to facilitate reflective meetings amongst themselves to share knowledge and develop ideas about supporting certain students or classes in difficulties. A lot of knowledge already exists among teachers on how to deal with students and classes in difficulties, but this knowledge might be pushed in the background when frustration goes up. What need to be strengthened are therefore the concrete methods for reflecting upon practice through both appreciative and critical questions, and for sharing this knowledge among teachers. The course will focus on tools to facilitate meetings that go beyond administration and to in-depth reflection on different perspectives on students’ difficulties and different ways to support them. These tools can be used either by teachers themselves or by counsellors to support teachers in doing this. Furthermore, techniques for collegial supervision will be introduced.

The course will give you…   

• An overview of the concept of collaborative teaching – the history of the concept and the evidence of its link to students’ well-being
• An insight into the social constructionist approach to well-being, learning and teamwork
• An awareness of how certain ideas can either help or limit the teaching practice
• Increased ability to look at the complex relations maintaining the problem
• An ability to step into the shoes of others, understand their perspective and ask the right questions to open for reflection on current practice
• Be able to facilitate reflective team meetings amongst own colleagues
• Being able to do collegial supervision

The course fee for this five day course is 775 Euro, which can be almost fully covered by an Erasmus+ grant (plus travel and stay). Of course, our courses are open to anyone, also without Erasmus+ grants!

Read more about this course here

Register now...