My Ideal Collaboration Between Students

Reflective Teaching 30 Day Blog Challenge

Day 25: The ideal collaboration between students, what would it look like?

My ideal collaboration would look like a group of students engaged in a task together and communicating about that task. They would be asking questions, thinking critically, sharing ideas, discussing alternatives, making decisions and giving and receiving instructions.

Ideally this would be evenly spread throughout the group of children with them all contributing. However in the real world we often see the same children talking and the same children listening. This is something that I would have to scaffold in my classroom as their are 1) children of varying ages, 2) some shy students that are to unsure to contribute and 3) some students that tend to dominate if allowed.

Would love to do more of this collaborative learning in the classroom and I think I might try it tomorrow. I have five Year 3 students, three of which could use a push to collaborate. It would be nice to show them a task and get them to teach it to other students rather than it being me that does all the directing!