“Collaborative learning” is growing ever more popular in the pedagogical lexicon and educators are often eager to incorporate it in their lessons and classrooms. But, like most concepts we hurriedly use with our students, teachers would do well to reflect on applying collaborative learning to ourselves—in our professional community and in the learning environment of which we are all a part.
Teachers can benefit immensely from collaborative learning—substantive collaboration that extends beyond mandatory participation in PLC or team meetings. While we are quick to look for outside help and resources to enhance teaching and strengthen learning in our classrooms, we often ignore that our most valuable assets are the women and men with whom we work every day.
At Woodford County Middle School, some teachers have worked to capitalize on the knowledge, skill, and experience of our colleagues. To create a truly collaborative environment, it is important that we understand what is going on inside of each other’s classroom, both from a curriculum standpoint and from a pedagogical perspective.
First is the emphasis on curricular collaboration. Teachers can encourage critical thinking and hone transferable skills by demonstrating to students the concepts they discuss throughout multiple classes are integrally connected. The content we examine in Social Studies, for example, can readily link to concepts and skills addressed in Language Arts. To capitalize on this connection, a Language Arts teacher and I partnered on a cross-curricular unit in which the students designed their own country, creating population data, a constitution and form of government, and regional characteristics. In so doing, they applied their knowledge of population, government, and geography to demonstrate their learning of the Social Studies content. But we didn’t stop there: the students also designed a flag, national anthem, and speech to present their country to the world, emphasizing the Language Arts concepts of imagery, argumentative appeals, and the use of symbols. Finally, the capstone of the project was a simulated United Nations, in which the students came together (i.e., “collaborative learning”) as ambassadors of their self-designed countries to solve global crises in their fictional world, writing and voting on resolutions.
The project covered a wide realm of Social Studies and Language Arts content and it was something the students (not to mention their teachers!) truly enjoyed. As we were planning to repeat the project this year, we realized that there is no reason the project should be isolated to Social Studies and Language Arts. Collaboration with the Science teachers revealed that the students’ countries would be perfect to use during a weather unit, in which students have to determine weather patterns for a specific latitude and longitude (coordinates they had already established as part of their project in Social Studies). Now, we had students creating weather forecasts for their countries. Additionally, the Math teachers recognized the value of the population statistics and data students had to create for their countries and incorporated these in their lessons on graphs and linear formulas.
What started as a two-class activity became a multi-disciplinary activity that demonstrated to students the relevance of, and the connections among, the content they explore in each of their classes. Isn’t that how the “real world” works, anyway? And by working together and aligning our content, the teachers modeled to students what collaboration looks like and how it is beneficial.
An excellent article.
ReplyDelete