The Power of Collaboration

When it comes to collaborative learning, well, I think that’s definitely a great asset to contemporary teaching. As a matter of fact, I started somehow working in a collaborative way a few years ago, when some of my classes were involved in an international project with a few classes of a secondary school in Athens, Greece. The small towns where I teach belong to an area in southern Italy where an ancient dialect of Greek origin is spoken by elderly people. The project aimed at building a virtual bridge between our schools through a collaborative research project: the students of the two schools became involved in research upon their common roots. It was a tremendous opportunity for our students to break the ice and get in touch with peers from another country. In addition, it gave them the chance to go through the value of collaboration as they were expected to tackle with various complex tasks involving problem solving approach as well as the use of the English language for real communication. But it was a formidable opportunity for me too. It helped me to get out from the comfort zone and start exchanging with other teachers out from the quite isolated context where I live and work.