Collaborative Planning, more than just working together

The PYP Programme Standards and Practices
Standard A
Practice 3.b
The school as a community of learners is committed to a collaborative approach to curriculum development.

We know collaborative planning is more than just teachers working together on a document. It is a group of thinkers, discussing ideas, asking questions, clarifying thoughts, challenging opinions, respecting others, and furthering our understandings. Collaboration allows individuals to share their knowledge, ideas, and experiences in order to actively participate with others.

At my current school, we are working on improving our collaborative planning among grade levels teams and specialists. In support of this goal, a colleague at our school shared a document on collaboration she received from Hamidah Abdul.

Single Subject Teacher ­ Stages in constructing transdisciplinary curriculum copy-3 by Skrtic

With the support and resources I have read about from my wonderful PLN and various workshops, I implemented a few new tools to help my G3 team collaboratively plan with our Mandarin department and Arts teacher for our next UoI, How We Express Ourselves. We are trying to model a Level 1 collaboration from the document above.

We first started with a graphic organizer to help get a better picture of the transdisciplinary nature of the unit. This organizer was introduced to me during my IB PYP Online Workshop, Transdisciplinary Learning.

The teachers really liked this organizer and found it easy to refer to as we discussed the unit.

I then introduced a few tools that were shared via @sherrattsam to help in the collaborative process. You can find his Scribd documents here
These included an organizer to ensure primary sources were discussed to make the inquiry more powerful.

I also included another of his tools so that we could look at this unit through the different subject lenses.

There are other helpful resources posted by @sherrattsam as well on the above Scribd link.
Back in August, 2012, the #pypchat topic was collaborative planning and there were also a lot of valuable resources referenced there as well.

What does collaboration planning look like in your school?