Cooperation and collaboration with colleagues

Prior to the pandemic, our team taught across 3 different sites in the college. It was often difficult to arrange team meetings, discuss our practice or find effective ways to share resources.

During the pandemic, because everyone was teaching remotely, it was suddenly possible to have online team meetings. Everyone had to adapt their teaching materials and approaches and we met online frequently to support one another and share ideas and experiences we had had with our online teaching. By using MSTeams, we were able to share information quickly via the messaging function and people began to communicate more iteratively – sharing lesson plans and resources that they knew could be useful for others. It was also easier to know who was teaching which groups and see where the overlaps with your own teaching were – sometimes the same class happens at different sites, for example. Before it was harder to know who was teaching that. We used to have shared folders for resources before but they were more of a repository and it was hard to know who was using what. We also began to co-develop lessons and resources more as everyone felt under pressure from the change to the teaching mode. A few of us decided to film some general videos on cross-cutting topics which could be used for a range of classes.

The introduction of different technologies, particularly MSTeams, has transformed the way we work together as a team. Before, we might have shared resources and modified them slightly to suit our own students. Now, we are co-creating resources and thinking about where the cross-cutting topics are in the curriculum and how we can support the learning of these in creative ways.

Our team have definitely gained a wealth of new skills and this has empowered us to create some new online courses in conjunction with a local university to support access to one of their programmes.