0.4 – Collaborative Learning and Peer Microteaching Groups

Two Groups

Did you ever take a large course in college with more than 50 students? If so, you may have been a part of a smaller subset of students who attended a smaller session of the course led by a Teaching Assistant. Likewise, we will manage this large course by creating Collaborative Learning Groups (CLG) of approximately 8-10 participants. In this way, you can more easily make connections with fewer classmates during collaborative activities. We have organized our CLGs according to time zones to enable you to more easily find suitable times to work together.

In addition, you will collaborate with two to three other classmates in a more intimate group called a Peer Microteaching Group (PMG). You will engage with your PMG throughout our course in a variety of ways, but most importantly, you will be participating in peer microteaching with members of this group. Your PMG will be the core group you work with in developing and teaching a synchronous lesson to students at California State University, San Bernardino in week five of our program. Your PMG is also organized by shared language and compatible time zones.

Peer Microteaching

Peer microteaching is an opportunity for you and a small group of peers to teach short lessons in front of each other in order to get feedback on that teaching. Your peer microteaching in week three will also serve as a practice session for the synchronous session you will teach to students of Arabic and Chinese at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) in week five of our program. The benefits of peer microteaching are:

• the opportunity to practice your teaching skills in an online environment in a supportive, non-threatening environment
• the opportunity to receive supportive feedback on your online teaching from  your peers’ multiple perspectives

Group Interaction 

Normally, you’ll interact with both groups within Moodlerooms, our program’s learning site, usually in forum discussion topics attached to specific modules in this course. Please note that we have included links to a general forum for each group. This is so that you can use these forums to discuss and plan for the work you will do together, for example, to schedule times you will meet live, to ask questions related to the development of your learning episode and lesson and to share resources. On some occasions, you’ll also work with your Collaborative Learning Group or your Peer Microteaching Group outside of Moodlerooms. You will be introduced to your Peer Microteaching Group and Collaborative Learning Group members during the first week of the course. At that time, you will learn how you will interact with one another.

Finding Your Groups

In the CLASSRoad Groups document (Links to an external site.) (.pdf) you will first see our Collaborative Learning Groups (CLG) with their members followed by our Peer Microteaching Groups (PMG) with their members. You can do a search for your name by using the following keyboard commands:

On a PC: Ctrl (control) + F and start typing your name

On a Mac: ⌘ (command) + F and start typing your name

Once you find your groups, follow the instructions in your Moodle activity for your next step.