While students are working hard during your project to learn and understand new knowledge, they are also learning a whole raft of other very important skills like collaboration, critical thinking and project management skills. Just like you might scaffold the learning in key knowledge areas, vital soft skills also need scaffolding to ensure are students work effectively and successfully. For students (and adults!) to effectively work together they need to learn what an ‘effective team’ looks like.
5 Tips to establish good collaboration in your classroom:
- Create a safe and trusting environment in your classroom. Create opportunities for students to share their thoughts, feelings and concerns with you and their peers in a non-judgemental environment.
- Set student generated group expectations. A great way to do this is to ask students what an effective or successful group looks like, feels like and sounds like. Use a Y chart and display it on the wall somewhere in the room for all to see throughout the process.
- Set roles for students within their team to ensure all members are included and contribute to the end result. This can be empowering for students to feel they have a purpose.
- Have a discussion with students about what body language an effective group member might have while collaborating. A great way to demonstrate the importance of body language is through a fun game of charades!
- Model and discuss active listening. Being a good listener benefits the listener and ensures all team members feel valued. You could teach this through an icebreaker at the beginning of your project or lesson to allow students to get to know each other. In pairs ask students to say a few things about themselves and ask the listener to remember and share the key points
Here are some websites with some more ideas:
- 5 Strategies to deepen collaboration: https://www.edutopia.org/article/5-strategies-deepen-student-collaboration-mary-burns
- Tch Tips: Teaching Collaboration to Students: https://www.teachingchannel.org/blog/2018/01/09/teaching-collaboration-skills
- Active Listening Activities: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/active-listening-activities
Stay tuned for a post about how project management can be used to further foster collaboration and provide structure for students working on projects,
This is so good – I think really working with students about what an ideal collaboration looks like is great – then they can aim for something they themselves agreed to.
Agree! And sometimes we need a little help to know how to do it well 🙂