Benefits of teaching interdisciplinary subjects collaboratively in Jordanian pre-vocational education

Abstract

The study aimed to investigate the benefits of teaching pre-vocational education (PVE) through the collaboration of the other teacher with the PVE teacher. The study adopted experimental and descriptive methodologies. An experiment was conducted through collaboration of teachers of different subjects in Pre-Vocational Education (PVE) to teach a class for a full school year (the experimental group), and another class was taught by the PVE teacher only (the control group). The number of students in each class was 35 students. To identify the effect of the experiment from the teachers point of view a semi-structured interview was conducted with each one of the participant teachers, while students responded to an attitudes scale in addition to practical and theoretical achievement tests. Results revealed that collaborative teaching that was undertaken co-operatively by the PVE teacher and teachers of other subjects better improved students' achievement and attitudes towards PVE in comparison to teaching only by the PVE teacher. It was also found that there are other benefits of multiteacher collaboration on the delivery of PVE; among these were: better training on practical skills, better integration with other school subjects, better record of students' progress that is required for guidance purposes, in addition to better time utilization of classes.