Emily Waddill Blog Post 3

While reading the article on collaboration something that struck me about collaboration is that we need to design group work so that the each member participating and working together is essential for them to succeed. I think a lot of times group work is not viewed that way, especially from the eyes of the students. This type of group work isn't as easy to plan, but it is an important shift that we should all make when planning learning experiences for our students. The final product in this project was not as important as the collaboration and all of the students working together to achieve a goal. The expectations were clearly set from the beginning and I also believe that high quality work comes from students contributing as a team.

My top three choices relating to collaboration that I feel are most important for my students include using effort to practice and grow, tackle and monitor learning, and actively participate. Too often students don’t want to put in the effort that it takes to solve a challenging problem and math is all about practicing the skills and taking the time to get quicker with multiplication or division facts for example. It is so very hard for students to understand that their actions now have consequences in the future and that we are laying the foundations for a successful future. Being able to organize what needs to be accomplished to complete a task is a hard thing to do especially for 6^th graders. The students don’t naturally think to themselves about what they need to know in order to solve something, so this is something that we need to try to get students in the habit of doing. Lastly, staying actively engaged in what they are working on is a challenge. A lot of students have a hard time staying focused for more than 5 minutes at a time and hardly any try strategies to focus themselves. Learning how to monitor their behavior and participate at the right times is one of the most important skills to learn.