Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration; Keith Sawyer; Basic Books, NY, 2007; 274 pp., $26.95. If you're involved in a business that depends on sustained innovation (and which doesn't?)-especially if you're a manager who can influence decisions and resources-then add this to your reading list. Keith Sawyer's writing is direct, clear, even friendly, and the text is unencumbered by ponderous footnotes and thick quotations. An associate professor of psychology at Washington University, St. Louis, Sawyer's personal hobbies of jazz and improv theater appear again and again to support his thesis that innovation is a product of groups, and that the solitary genius is a myth. But the scope of the book is more than that: it covers the important and current thinking about fostering innovation in the Internet-enabled age. By my own reading and experience in a research-driven Fortune 500 corporation, the innovation literature is converging on a number of "best practices." Sawyer captures them well, and with his well-chosen supporting anecdotes these are reason enough to read the book and get to work applying these lessons in your organization: * Poorly structured, lazy brainstorming is practiced so frequently and is so wasteful, we can't have enough books that reveal its flaws and how to improve upon it. Sawyer's treatment is excellent. * Sustained innovation depends on having many irons in the fire, with the corollary that failure will be frequent and must be supported. * Myths about lone geniuses need bursting. Even those who work alone stand on the shoulders of giants, and implementation always needs teamwork and has its own continuing need for creative problem solving. The risk of propagating the solitary genius concept (to the exclusion of other possibilities) is that organizations will fail to support "messy" teams. * Innovation happens at the "edge of chaos"; either too much or too little structure is destructive. * Clusters are important. It may seem risky to have many firms in one location competing for a common pool of talent, but history shows that a crossfertilizing, dynamic environment is more innovative and sustainable. * The Internet and related communications standards are flattening the world at an unprecedented pace; the Web empowers enormous networks of individual innovators. Standing still is not an option. Group Genius also benefits from: * Annotated Notes: Sawyer has made a wise choice to keep the prose simple and fast-moving, but as a result, major ideas sometimes jump off the page as bald assertions (for example, ". . . the most effective . . . groups are self-managing. . . . without being directed by a leader."). The annotated notes at the end of the book provide good counterweight and credibility to the breezy style. * Frequent Checklists: The book is sprinkled with bulleted lists of do's and don'ts, which stitch the storytelling narrative together into practical advice. …

Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration

Co-teaching as a context for teachers' professional learning and joint knowledge construction

Collaborative practice is integral to effective inclusion. Within schools, teacher collaboration can foster communities of practice through a series of professional relationships that enhance the e...

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Collaborative classroom practice for inclusion: perspectives of classroom teachers and learning support/resource teachers

Achieving symbiosis: Working through challenges found in co-teaching to achieve effective co-teaching relationships

Co-teaching is a widely implemented instructional strategy that poses unique challenges to teachers and may require targeted training. This study considers the role of pre-service and in-service professional development opportunities regarding co-teaching and teacher confidence, interests, and attitudes regarding co-teaching in a sample of general education and special education teachers. After controlling for key teacher demographics, professional development opportunities around co-teaching were positively associated with each teacher outcome. Teachers with more frequent in-service opportunities in co-teaching were more confident in their co-teaching practice and demonstrated higher levels of interest and more positive attitudes about co-teaching than did those teachers with less frequent in-service opportunities. Pre-service training on co-teaching was also positively associated with teacher confidence.

Professional Development Experiences in Co-Teaching: Associations with Teacher Confidence, Interests, and Attitudes.

Although collaboration among service providers has been a hallmark of special education almost since its inception, co-teaching, the sharing of instruction by a general education teacher and a special education teacher or another specialist in a general education class that includes students with disabilities, is a relatively recent application. As a result of recent federal legislation and related policy changes, co-teaching has evolved rapidly as a strategy for ensuring that these students have access to the same curriculum as other students while still receiving the specialized instruction to which they are entitled. Despite considerable enthusiasm expressed by those who write about co-teaching and those who implement it, co-teaching illustrates the complexity of conceptualizing and studying collaboration in special education. Most inquiry on co-teaching has emphasized co-teachers' roles and relationships or program logistics rather than demonstrating its impact on student achievement and other key out...

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Cynthia Shamberger MEd

Papers

Co-Teaching: An Illustration of the Complexity of Collaboration in Special Education.

Reading More, Reading Better by Elfrieda H. Hiebert (review)