Teaching together towards higher education: co-teaching between Gradia and JAMK

What happens when two educational institutions join forces? The aim of the co-teaching between Jyväskylä Educational Consortium Gradia and Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences is to give secondary school students the opportunity to get familiar with higher education and to increase their interest in further studies while they are still studying at Gradia. The cooperation has its origins in the field of ICT, where overlaps in study content between institutions and degrees were identified. This led to a practical experiment: Gradia students started to study programming in the learning environments of Jamk, still under the guidance of Gradia teachers. The collaboration benefits students, teachers as well as institutions.

Content of two degrees simultaneously

According to the word, in co-teaching the teachers work together as the Gradia teacher guides the student in the accumulation of competences and the Jamk teacher is responsible for the completed credits in higher education. In concrete terms, the cooperation works in such a way that the Gradia students complete the studies at the Jamk learning environment with the same content and learning objectives as Jamk students. For Gradia students the studies provide both the knowledge and the opportunity to study at higher level at the same time. 

Co-teaching, which originally started with programming in autumn 2019, was later extended to include cyber security and electrical engineering. Jussi Torppa, who was involved in developing the co-teaching processes from the beginning, and Juha Toivanen, who joined to develop the cooperation after the expansion to electrical and automation engineering, feel that cooperation lowers the threshold to higher education and provides students a more independent and challenging study methods.

Now, well over hundred students are already taking co-teaching studies on a yearly basis, which means that they have been established as an effective practice and model of cooperation. This coming autumn the collaboration will be further expanded when all ICT students at Gradia will take the ICT skills course at JAMK as part of their studies.

As the actual teaching is done by Gradia, the Jamk teacher does not act at the student interface beyond the management of the learning environment. In the future, more encounters between the Jamk teacher and Gradia students could also be considered, for example through a study visit to Jamk as part of the course, which would make the higher education environment even more accessible to secondary school students.

Benefits of co-teaching

In the best-case scenario, cooperation is beneficial for all parties involved. For students with a broader interest in the field, it can provide additional challenges to their studies and support their transition to postgraduate studies. Gradia teachers can use existing university level materials, while Jamk is able to reach motivated future students. Co-teaching has already yielded good results, and the experience of higher education has inspired many to continue their studies for example through EduJyväskylä studies.  From the staff’s point of view, cooperation supports networking between institutions and the development of their own expertise.

In the future, the aim is to extend co-teaching to other fields as well. Through EduJyväskylä such models can be used more widely and offer more and more students the opportunity to diversify their studies. Institutional cross-studies can therefore be used in education to take students further and provide a meaningful extra challenge to their studies where necessary. EduJyväskylä aims to increase cross-studying between educational institutions and teacher cooperation is a great tool and opportunity to promote this.