Collaboration - Jessica Barwick

Each year, I struggle with effectively teaching collaboration skills.  I do believe that explicitly teaching and modeling good collaborative practices is necessary with every grade level (because it looks different with each age group), but I think practice, trial and error is the best way students learn how to collaborate with others.  That being said, I enjoyed reading these blogs on collaboration and have some takeaways that I plan to incorporate in my classroom.  My top three elements that would most benefit my current classroom (and future classrooms) are collaboration contracts, benchmarks with ongoing feedback, and a balance of individual and group tasks.

I love the idea of a collaboration contract where all group members come up with their own set of rules, consequences, responsibilities, and goals of the group.  If students created one at the beginning, they would have more ownership in their role within the group and would be in violation of their own rules if they chose not to follow them.  I believe this would be more meaningful than simply following a teacher created rubric on how to collaborate.  Each group member would hold each other more accountable with a contract, and there might be more of a desire to not let the group down.

I also believe it's important to give students ongoing feedback on their collaborative process during a project.  Maybe using the BIE rubric as a guide, I could give groups a score once per week, with the goal of raising that score by the end of the project.  That way, students would get feedback from me on specific goals they need to work on as well as a chance to raise their score.  I know, as a student, I would appreciate the opportunity to get feedback, learn from it, and raise my grade rather than have the pressure of just one score at the end of an assignment.  Currently, I do point out groups that are working well together and give them rewards (like moving up their behavior clips), but I have nothing like specific benchmarks to let them know specifically what they are doing well and what they should work on.

Finally, as someone who typically prefers to work alone, I believe students would appreciate a better balance of individual and group tasks.  Perhaps the contract in the beginning could help specify which aspects of the project would be done by individuals.  As a student, I always hated group projects and group grades because the work would usually be done mostly by me and if someone didn't pull their weight, it could affect my grade.  As a teacher, it's hard to always see which individuals contribute which parts of a project, so giving a group grade does seem fair.  But balancing individual and group tasks would allow for more individualized grades and responsibility.  My current project does allow for both individual and group tasks (individual journals, group skit) but I will keep this in mind for all future group projects.

Like I mentioned earlier, I do believe that more practice with diverse groups of peers is what ultimate leads to a more collaborative classroom.  This year, I have had more morning meetings and team problem solving challenges in those, and I believe working together on those challenges has helped increase cooperation during class projects.  However, there is always room for improvement, and in future group projects, I will try to utilize these three elements of collaboration.