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This paper aims to focus on the thinking styles of a group of Accounting students, and to determine whether team teaching by two criteria-specific lecturers can be an effective collaborative teaching approach to accommodate students’ diverse learning preferences. Research on thinking and learning processes led to a four-quadrant whole-brain model of people’s thinking styles and associated learning preferences. The model can be used to identify and accommodate students’ diverse thinking styles and learning preferences.

A case study approach was followed, using multiple data collection methods. The thinking styles of 288 students and two lecturers were surveyed using a thinking style questionnaire and the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument. The results of the collaborative teaching approach were obtained by way of a survey questionnaire providing both quantitative and qualitative feedback, as well as a SWOT analysis completed by the involved lecturers.

The main results suggest that a collaborative teaching approach can address students’ diverse learning preferences, although some students may find constant switching between lecturers distracting.

The collaborative teaching approach in the teaching interaction cannot be isolated. Collaborative teaching was not repeated or extended due to resource constraints.

Academics from all disciplines recognise a need for a teaching practice that addresses students’ diverse learning preferences. Hitherto, outside of special education, collaborative teaching has received little scholarly attention, especially as an approach to address tertiary students’ diverse learning preferences.

The purpose of this paper is to explore shared workspace and professional learning community (PLC) interactions in schools. The collaborative culture and PLCs were parts of the school culture. The collaborative culture of each school was designed to ensure teachers share intellectual and physical contributions in learning to investigate the impact of teaching and learning on students. The workspace overlap for teachers was part of the culture of each school and a function of the PLC interactions. PLCs provided opportunities for collaboration and therefore opportunities to share intellectual and physical workspace.

A grounded theory research approach was taken to this investigation, primarily because of the common experiences of educators in schools (Creswell, 2013). Collaborative process between educators in schools was qualitatively investigated as a function of PLC interactions. In all, three communities, five schools, and 70 educators were purposefully selected to participate. Data were collected, including semi-structured interviews, observations, artifacts, and researcher field notes.

The workspace interactions include shared leadership, decision making, teaching and learning practice, and accountability measures. Attributes and characteristics of effective collaboration and PLCs greatly affect the outcomes of PLCs. An emergent framework is provided that includes attributes of effective collaboration and the characteristics of effective PLCs that merge into intellectual and physical shared workspace.

This paper focuses on the connections between PLCs, school culture, and professional educator collaboration. This paper proposes to provide a unique model called the shared workspace. The model combines the intellectual and physical aspects of group members to ensure the effectiveness of collaborative systems that promote quality practice in schools through functional PLCs as part of a positive school culture. This paper further offers extensions to the shared leadership concept (Carpenter, 2015) in how schools, administrators, and teachers should work together, thus more collaboratively through a continuous improvement process of the school as a workplace and a learning organization.

This research investigated whether structuring an inquiry-oriented professional learning network to include school-based co-teaching partners would amplify educators' success in taking up and adapting evidence-based understandings and practices as meaningful in their contexts. Our research questions were: (1) What conditions did educators identify in the PLN overall that supported their co-construction of knowledge and practice development together? and (2) How did including co-teaching partners in the PLN help participants to mobilize knowledge and/or practices in the contexts where they were working?

A qualitative case study design was used because of its potential to examine how and why questions about complex processes as situated in context (Butler, 2011; Yin, 2014). A case study methodology allowed us to collect and coordinate multiple forms of evidence (i.e. interviews, teacher reflective writing, classroom artifacts, field notes) to examine both how conditions created within the PLN supported learning and how co-teaching partners were mobilizing what they were learning in their school contexts. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and data was analyzed abductively through an iterative and recursive process (Braun et al., 2018).

Conditions within the PLN overall that participants identified as supportive to their knowledge mobilization and practice development included: having a shared focus, feeling accountability to the group, collaborative enactment of practices within the PLN, large group sharing and debriefing, sustained cycles of collaborative inquiry, affective support, valuing diversity and drawing from expert others as resources. Participants also identified the benefits that accrued specifically from working with co-teaching partners. In addition, findings showed how the degree to which partners engaged in rich forms of collaborative inquiry could be related to their learning and situated practice development.

Findings show the generative potential of inviting co-teaching partners into a PLN to engage in collaborative inquiry with others. PLNs offer the benefit of engaging with educators from outside of one's practice context, which enables pushing their thinking in new directions. Our findings add to the literature by revealing how in situ knowledge mobilization can be amplified when educators participating within a PLN are also working through cycles of inquiry with a co-teaching partner. Overall, this study offers a PLN model where teachers have built-in support for knowledge co-creation and mobilization both within and outside of their school contexts.

This study explores a pedagogical approach to teaching students a collaborative information delivery process in the context of BIM. The objectives were to understand how students approach this complex, open-ended problem of planning their collaborative process and then identify strategies for improving their process through a plan-do-check-act cycle and reflecting on the applicability of industry standards.

The authors present a longitudinal case study based on qualitative data from the 3 consecutive years of teaching a senior undergraduate course in a construction engineering program.

The findings offer a rich picture of how students approached this collaborative process and emphasize the complex nature of teaching BIM as information management process. The authors present instances of how students made sense of BIM standards through applied experience. The findings also demonstrate the value of an outcome-based approach whereby knowledge is gained through an iterative plan-do-check-act cycle. Here, the BEP and model deliverables served only as vehicles to test and apply a range of skills by making them more explicit.

The research contributes to the literature on mechanisms that support students in planning, managing and improving collaborative information strategies in a BIM context. Specifically, the authors illustrate a tension in how to pedagogically deploy industry-oriented process planning methods to establish relevance for students in order to effectively engage in interdisciplinary teams.

In this paper, the authors argue that teaching students how to plan, design and enact effective BIM collaboration information delivery is firmly nested within pedagogical management and communication skills. The authors illustrate with examples how students make sense of BIM approaches by making them concrete and meaningful to their own experience.

In an effort to better prepare pre-service candidates to work with all students and to respond to the current collaborative team teaching trend within New York City public schools, the authors who are professors of bilingual education and inclusive education/disability studies, respectively, combined their student teaching seminars in bilingual education and childhood education, in order to: (1) provide a model of co-teaching as well as an experience and perspective of being a student in a classroom with two teachers; (2) provide pre-service candidates with ongoing access to the expertise of two professors during their student teaching experience; (3) engage pre-service teachers in critical conversations about identifying and resisting deficit constructions of both emergent bilingual students and students with disabilities; (4) engage in a self-study of teaching practice within this collaborative context; (5) consider how well our respective programs currently prepare pre-service teachers. The Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices approach gleaned data from the co-instructors’ weekly reflective journals and student evaluations to reveal multiple benefits of a collaborative classroom context for pre-service teachers as well as the professors. These benefits included a rethinking of academic structures, spaces for interconnectedness across fields, and increased professor and student learning. The findings challenge teacher educators to consider whether or not a traditional approach to teacher preparation truly offers pre-service teachers the tools to serve diverse students. The authors call on schools of education to transgress traditional academic boundaries to adequately prepare pre-service teachers for the 21st century classroom.

Active learning is not a simple practice. It is a new paradigm for the provision of high-quality, collaborative, engaging, and motivating education. Active learning has the capacity to respond to most of the challenges that institutions of higher education are facing in our time. In this chapter, we present active learning strategies used in STEM disciplines and we analyze the potential of active learning to redefine the value proposition in academic institutions. After providing the theoretical underpinnings of active learning as an evolving practice, an attempt is made to connect it with different learning theories and present an integrative model in which institutional strategies, learning strategy and information, and communication technologies work synergistically toward the development of knowledge and skills. We then present the results of a survey examining “stories” of active learning from the STEM disciplines, identifying good teaching practices, and discussing challenges and lessons learned. The key idea is that active engagement and participation of students is based on faculty commitments and inspiration and mentoring by faculty. We finally present a stage model for the implementation of active learning practices in higher education. Emphasis is put on a new vision for higher education, based on systematic planning, implementation, and evaluation of active learning methods, collaboration, engagement with society and industry, innovation, and sustainability, for a better world for all.

This paper reports on the processes and outcomes of a collaborative self-study conducted by three beginning teacher educators who sought to examine the efficacy of their teaching practices while working with student teachers in the field. By systematically embracing opportunities to explore mutually pressing issues and concerns manifest across the student teaching semester, the authors found that collaborative self-study provided a useful framework for considering their pedagogical reasoning and decision making as they encouraged student teachers to engage in rationale-based practice. The understandings gleaned from this study provided the authors with a basis upon which to reexamine their developing teacher educator pedagogies, as well as to critique the nature and structure of their teacher education program.

The remarkable achievements being promoted through inclusive education practices make the deficiencies associated with educational exclusion all the more noticeable. Despite many schools adopting the philosophy of inclusion, avoidable educational exclusion of students with special needs still persists in educational systems worldwide. This is because the preparation of competent teachers to respond to variations in student populations in schools is very difficult to achieve. A major reason for this difficulty is that most student education programs fail to nurture collaborative instructional practice culture in student teachers, which can enable them to work well with others to teach all students. Utilizing the status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness (SCARF) model developed by David Rock, this chapter contributes to existing knowledge on student teacher development by theorizing and offering practical ways to enact collaborative instructional practices in inclusive education. The chapter addresses this issue by reporting student teachers' experiences in a course unit on inclusive education in one Australian university that adopted a collaborative instructional practice, deepening their understanding and practice of inclusion.

The purpose of this research study is to explore simple collaborative technique for teaching mathematics and thus improving the problem solving skills of the students. Better pedagogic activities are required to motivate the students to perceive mathematics as a subject that stimulates problem-solving skills required for engineers.

This paper presents a research study on the application of technology-supported collaborative learning in improving the problem-solving skills of first-year engineering students in a mathematics course. The experiment was conducted in a mathematics course “Engineering Calculus” with 286 first-year engineering students in two groups: experimental group (N = 60) and controlled group (N = 226). The academic performance of the students was measured and analyzed with statistical techniques.

From the results obtained, it was found that the academic performance of the experimental group was better than the controlled group. Also, interest shown by the students in the topic that dealt with collaborative learning was more than in other topics taught using conventional teaching methods.

The teachers are required to find effective pedagogical activities to improve the problem-solving skills in mathematics. The research work proposes a collaborative method in mathematics for attaining higher cognitive level in an entry level engineering course. The limitation of this study lies in group formation techniques and the grading policy which deals only with individual assessment scores.

Practice of collaborative learning is made easy with simple technology. A clear strategy for the conduct of collaborative learning sessions has been presented. The solutions recommended are practically feasible and does not require any special infrastructure or specific training.

Using technology in mathematics teaching may not be very easy for all teachers. Especially, for an undergraduate engineering fresher, mathematics may not be a very easy task. This work shall bridge the gap with simple technology-assisted collaborative learning. The teachers need not spend too much time and effort in learning technology for mathematics teaching. The effect of this learning is significant in terms of the performance and satisfaction evaluation.

This work presents a systematic implementation of collaborative learning that shall result in improved problem-solving skills and engaging learning sessions. The statistical analysis methods and the visualization of obtained results shall help in understanding the implications of the presented work. Practice of collaborative learning is made easy with simple technology. The solutions recommended are practically feasible and does not require any special infrastructure or specific training.

This chapter develops a theoretical model of a collaborative inquiry-based group development process with a grounded theory approach. The purpose of this research study is to examine how educators engage in collaborative inquiry-based group development processes that transform their professional identity and pedagogical practices. Qualitative research data comes from the Livingstone Inquiry Group (LIG) in Vancouver, Canada. It is a longitudinal case study of inquiry-based pedagogies (IBPs) in a community of learners. They started in 2007 with members representing K-12 teachers, resource staff, administrators, higher education, and union organizations. The model outlines generative dynamics between social capital and relational learning which support pedagogical paradigm shifts in the group’s collaboration. Implications of this study provide direction for research regarding inquiry-based learning in higher educational institutions as an important forum for sustainable professional development of teachers as life-long learners.