Abstract:

Educational co-working was born from the union of co-teaching and co-learning. This concept proposes new ways of relationships between universities and schools, installs new conceptions of time and educational spaces, and promotes the collaborative construction of knowledge among professors, pre-service teachers, teachers and students at school. The objective of this study is to describe pre-service teachers’ perceptions of collaborative work after an experience of educational co-working implemented in one Chilean university and two local schools.

Participants were 30 pre-service teachers that were attending the third year at the Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción (11 men and 19 women). For this research, pre-service teachers and 65 students schoolers co-worked interacting in person based on the achievement of a curricular objective. Pre-service teachers focused on the development of their ICT skills, and students oriented the tasks to write an informative text. They co-worked in dyads.

It was applied a questionnaire to know the pre-service teachers’ opinions and valuation about collaborative activities (as co-working with middle schoolers) in 7 dimensions: conception, utility, planning, organization, standards, functioning, and collaborative work efficacy. After the experience results showed in general high levels of agreement about the different aspects of cooperative learning through co-working, such as the students' conception, its usefulness for training, the repercussions of teacher planning on the effectiveness of the groups, the criteria for its constitution, intragroup norms that increase performance, operating rules and requirements to improve academic results. Also, it is possible to affirm that there are statistically significant differences by gender in the level of agreement about the collaborative work in 4 dimensions: conception, utility, functioning and collaborative work efficacy.

Main conclusions allow us to affirm that after this co-working experience our pre-service teachers are more engaged about its usefulness for training, the repercussions of teacher planning on the effectiveness of the groups, the criteria for its constitution, intragroup norms that increase performance, operating rules and requirements to improve academic results. Additional data are being collected to investigate the effects of creative thinking and computational thinking skills in middle-schoolers when they participate in co-working activities at the university.

Keywords:

Collaborative work, Educational co-working, Pre-service teachers, Middle-school, University.