In our experience, collaboration is a superior way of delivering instruction. In our collaboration, we were practicing heuristics. The term heuristic comes from the Greek word heurisken, which means “to discover.” In our work together, heuristic means, discovering
conclusions obtained by exploration of possibilities rather than by following a set of strict rules. For our purposes, we define collaboration as using multiple voices (in this case three, one high school teacher and two university faculty members) as a complex heuristic device to guide in the discovery of higher levels of teaching and learning.
In the scope of collaboration, heuristics is flexible, intuitive, and improvisational, involves critical thinking, and welcomes uncertainty. Heuristics is neither “winging it” nor abandoning a learning objective or lesson plan. Employing a heuristic model allowed us to have a strategy for dealing with the inevitable reality of the unexpected event.
In this article, we tell the reader about the heuristic device upon which we based our collaboration, how that cycle looked in our work, what we gained from the collaboration, and what we learned from our collaboration that might be meaningful to other teachers, both in K-12 schools and in universities. In an effort to illuminate our experiences we also detail recommendations we have for others wishing to collaborate in similar ways.
Context of Our Collaboration
Our collaboration made possible a series of lessons focusing on teaching high school students in a remedial English class how to understand the audience and purpose of different texts, how to change and create texts to persuade specific audiences and purposes, that might not have happened had we not all worked together. We each brought strengths and resources to these lessons that we would not have had access to if any of us had tried to teach them on our own. Below, we describe an overview of the project, the heuristics cycle we followed, and how our collaboration worked during its implementation.
Audience and Purpose Unit of Study
Like many teaching experiments this unit of study was a work in progress throughout the semester. Our main goal was to engage the ninth grade students in different types of response activities, our interim goals were adjusted as we worked according to our reflection on each lesson. As our teaching moved forward, we began to identify some student outcomes:
• Students will be able to identify audience and purpose of various texts.
• Students will be able to create a multi-modal text for a specific audience and purpose.
• Students will be able to describe ways in which modalities such as color, font, images
and text impact the consumer’s understanding of purpose and audience.
Heuristic Cycle
As stated above, we approached collaboration as a complex heuristic device for teaching. We chose the Deming wheel (Moen & Norman, 2010) as our model. The Deming wheel is intended to be used when implementing change (Moen & Norman). The Deming wheel begins with planning which includes stating a premise, making predictions, and planning. When following this heuristic device, a premise is created by stating the objective of the cycle, then participants in the cycle make predictions or speculate about the outcomes, and then develop a plan to carry out the cycle.
Following the planning stage, the cycle then leads users to carry out the “test” by implementing the plan while also documenting any problems and unexpected observations, as well as beginning to analyze the data collected. The study stage of the cycle involves completing the analysis of the data, comparing data to the predictions, and summarizing what was learned through both expected and unexpected outcomes. As a cycle, this model does not end, however,
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