I’m often in a position where I must share my lessons with my colleagues. There is often a rotation within our language department, which means that we are obliged to prepare courses for a few semesters and then hand them over to other colleagues.
The problems occurring are numerous, even if culture of sharing among teachers is more frequent in Sweden, where transparency is a way of life, compared to France : afraid of being judged and getting a bad feedback, too busy to take time to explain to colleagues, different pedagogic or way of seeing the problems, jealousy between colleagues, a certain reluctance to share work that has taken a long time to complete, lack of encouragement from the people in charge…
It would be nice to have some guidelines or tools to try and solve these problems.Like for instance having a common tool (platform, teaching blog) where we could go and contribute, and gives advice or feedback on everybody’s documents.As a native French speaker, I often come across language mistakes in documents written by my fellow teachers of french who do not have French as their mother tongue. And it’s not always easy to tell them without appearing to criticize them.But it would be another tool, implying an overload of work (when we have already many digital tools like platforms to take care of).
Having workshop where every teacher shares its own work or it’s way of working with tips, advice could be another alternative (we have started to do that last term and it was interesting to see how other teachers reflect about their own teaching, and the methods they use). But it requires a willingness and a trust of everybody.
Another interesting aspect of this topic was to understand the world of licensed resources and be able to always stand on the right side when using material on internet (pictures as far as I am concerned) . A thought-provoking exercise.
