Those philosophers amongst us may spend a great deal of time and energy discussing this question, but teachers such as myself would probably answer with a wry smile "more knowledge than we have now!"

That indeed, is reason alone to engender a bit of team spirit in the principles of facilitating learning. If we teachers have mastered the knack of engaging our class, and can rustle up enough open and higher order questions to engender a sense of enquiry amongst our charges, then perhaps we ought to share out the task of enabling students to discover answers.

Every person in the world is filled with knowledge and skills of different varieties. How can we encourage people to share this vast wealth of understanding, and really begin to learn from each other? Knowledge and understanding are not learned in isolation. As our access to information grows, and our knowledge resource pool expands exponentially, as individuals we will simply never catch up with it -- and why should we? What purpose would that serve?

The value of collaboration
However, in collaboration, we can achieve much more. If little Lily wants to learn about tigers, who can help her really understand; the zookeeper who works with tigers, or me, her teacher who just had a swift glance through Google’s finest?! As Lily’s teacher, I cannot possibly know all the answers to the questions she will ask, but it is most definitely my responsibility to equip her with the thirst, skills and opportunities to be able to find out.

My last school was situated right in the middle of a Royal Armed Forces housing estate, so children came to school with a knowledge of the Navy unlike an average 4 year old. This authentic knowledge and understanding formed a brilliant foundation for a project-driven curriculum, and thus we began a project entitled "In the Navy" with a goal of creating a children’s guide to the Royal Navy.

We started this project by using a forum on our Learning Platform to record all the ideas that we wanted to explore. We created a huge list of questions and found ourselves with a two fold problem. Who could answer our wide range of questions, and how could the children easily and clearly share their findings when they were only just beginning to read and write to a standard accessible by others. We were not content with recording our findings merely for the purposes of teacher assessment and classroom display as is so often the case; we wanted a real audience.

Experts wanted
Given that the school’s catchment housed a large number of Navy personnel, we asked for volunteers who would become our Navy experts, and two of these personnel were fathers actively serving aboard ships. These fathers came into school to meet the children making this link more concrete and generating some exciting cross-curricular activities and classroom display, but the real success came later. Year 1 and 2 children learned how to post new questions upon a Learning Platform forum, often delighting in changing their text font, colour and size (spot the ICT NC skills coverage…), and then were both excited and enthralled when their questions received responses from the experts they had recently met.

Our Navy experts were able to access our question forum via our Learning Platform whilst on active service aboard their ship hundreds of miles away, and we were particularly excited when these responses came with explanatory images, sound or photographs. This E-Pal relationship continued as these fathers travelled aboard their ships, and the children were soon engaged in mapping their routes upon classroom map displays and using Google maps.

HMS Manchester (pictured) was one of the ships with which this relationship took place.

Motivation
During the project children gathered information about the Navy, and began to create Talking Books and labelled e-pictures which shared their findings. Thus, we had a children’s guide to the Navy without over-dependence on reading and writing although you’ll spot the obvious links to a whole host of curriculum areas.

All of the children, particularly boys, were enormously motivated and engaged by this approach, and as a rather unexpected consequence, we soon found that boys in particular were making swift and comprehensive progress in their reading; I remember one particular little boy whose metaphorical ‘Reading Light’ was well and truly switched on as a direct result of this collaborative project; he was captivated by the conversations that he could have with a man hundreds of miles away in the middle of the sea.

Now I could wax lyrical about the impact on children’s engagement, motivation, achievement and sheer excitement through approaches like this, but better still would be to give you a few ideas so that you can try it out for yourself and see what I mean.

Using your locality
Every school is unique and has something about it which could prompt localised projects; whether this is the school building, local area, trends of employment, historical connections or something entirely different, there will be some distinctive feature. This feature will by default bring expertise with it; if your school is in the middle of an agricultural area, then you will have a range of farming expertise in your locality.

If your school is in the middle of Winchester then you have a wealth of English history surrounding you. Schools in West Berkshire for example have been working with local illustrators to learn from their expertise in order to create specific illustrated projects, schools in Beijing have been focusing on the Olympians as role models; their ideals and achievements. Clearwater Bay School in Hong Kong has been working on a collaborative project with an interior designer and architect to plan, create, deliver, reflect and improve upon a shared design brief. The realms of possibility are vast.

Getting started
So how do we start? Perhaps a useful and informative activity is to ask families to complete a survey; maybe under the guise of a "Our Families" topic, finding out what skills family members believe they have and if they’d like to share these within your school. Some time ago a little boy from Early Years class described with great excitement how his daddy helped pop stars make records. His father later came into school and voluntarily captured the school singing Christmas carols for a CD that we later sold at the Christmas Fayre.

The next step here of course is this same daddy working with children to capture their sounds for a shared family soundtrack; maybe for a family "HomeSpace" as they are increasingly becoming known. This same survey also revealed a father who was a restaurant manager who then kindly agreed to come into school to teach children how to cook simple food; the next step here is sharing photographs of the children having made these at home, with space for children and families to feedback how it went, asking for advice for future culinary activities and sharing healthy recipes a la Jamie Oliver!

When you’ve collected your survey information about skills which family members have (including grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts) then is the time when you’ll find that housed around your school are experts and skills which really can add value to your curriculum. Most families want to support their children, and I believe, from what I’ve seen, really delight in being given the opportunity to contribute their skills and knowledge to not only their own child, but to their child’s class. Children themselves become very excited by the relationships which they build up, and of course these have the potential to become lifelong relationships between children’s families. You’re therefore potentially building communities of people who are able to support each other’s lifelong learning.

Conclusion
The question is not if this will work; it does -- all over the world. The real question is; are you prepared to share your expertise in facilitating learning opportunities, with subject expertise held by your school community?

Fiona is an Education Development Consultant, with UniServity. This article first appeared in Computers in Classrooms December 2007.

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