Resumen de Instructional collaborative practices: a Brazilian case study
Ana Paula Bossler, Pedro Zany Caldeira
This study aims to describe the collaborative practices among primary and secondary Brazilian teachers. An online survey of teaching practices asked for the teachers’ actions regarding collaboration, namely the sharing of lesson plans and instructional materials. Completed the survey 79 teachers, mainly from the state of Minas Gerais. Although at school the participants recognize the advantages of collaborative teaching practices, usually they do not join forces with one another. In fact, they do not share lesson plans and much less their instructional material. The few collaborative practices reported included a Science and Knowledge Fair. However, in site observations showed that those practices could not be classified as collaborative because: 1. The students’ teams compete among themselves, 2. Students are not encouraged to look at their classmates’ work, 3. The Fairs result only in an accumulation of tasks and a great meeting of people. In-depth interviews with four teachers have made it possible to understand why teachers are not usually involved in collaborative practices at school: fear of critics, as they fear their colleagues criticize their lesson plans or their instructional materials, and fear of competition, for example they fear their colleagues will take up their jobs in the future. Two of these teachers said that they set out to share lesson plans and educational materials in the beginning as teachers, but they quickly quit when they saw that their fellows did not share with them their work.
