Austin Baker
The biggest thing
I've learned about collaboration (and PBL in general) is that it's messy. I
mean that it doesn't look like the stereotypical classroom, and
it's definitely a lot more fluid and organic. I always liken it to riding in
the passenger side of your car; it feels familiar, but it's still pretty
strange.
Getting back on
track with discussing collaboration, it's hard. It's hard for the kids and it's
hard for the teacher. I think Curtis is right in that we don't teach how to
collaborate in high school. You wind up addressing it after a project or two
goes south because of a lack of collaboration, but it's just not something I
think a lot of people think about because you get wrapped in the teaching of what
you need for the project, and not necessarily on the nuts and bolts of how to
actually work together. I'm sure that's because we, as teachers, were usually
the kids who just took over a project and did it all ourselves (because
obviously our group mates weren't going to do it correctly, right?). We are used to being in control, and everyone in the room is supposed to be doing what we say.
I touch on
collaboration at the start of each semester when I establish the hierarchy of
my program, meaning that if the upper level kids ask the lower level kids to
assist, they need to (as long as everything is reasonable), but other than
that, I pretty much leave them on their own to sort stuff out.
Since I've started
trying PBL stuff in my English class as well, I've definitely noticed the need
for more accountability. Those students are typically not nearly as
intrinsically motivated as the photo kids, so I can tell they need more
clearly-defined guidelines than the photo kids. I've introduced
peer-evaluations, and they were okay, but I like the idea of student-generated
contracts and I think they'll be good.
I actually really like the idea someone posted in the comment
section of Curtis’s post about how to have the students self-grade:
I definitely think I'll give that a try because, I myself, like many others, have found the hardest part of collaboration is assigning a number grade to it. In all honestly, I find assigning a number grade to any PBL the hardest part of it, because I think so much time is wasted trying to turn this organic, sometimes messy, but definitely genuine learning into a number grade, but...that's a rant for another time.
Hi Austin,
ReplyDeleteYou shared how your experience is similar to that of Curtis's in that as secondary teachers we tend to assume that students have already built these soft skills and we expect that they should be able to immediately apply when we direct them to. I am more and more convinced that we have to teach explicitly what we value and provide students time to apply with more and more responsibility until they gain independence and ownership. You shared how you liked one way a teacher who commented on Curtis's blog posts helped students build this ownership into collaboration by having them engage in self-assessment through grading themselves on collaboration. I believe this can be extremely beneficial provided students have some ownership in creating the rubric so they understand what and how they will be assessed. Reflection is essential for growth in any concept. If we value collaboration and realize it's essential for pbl to be effective, we have to make time to define it, to teach it, and for students to apply in ways that provide more than one opportunity to be successful. I'd love to see how this grading works for you with your class.