Forums
Managing Collaboration
Wed, 2009-11-18 11:19
I am the principal of a small junior high school and we are having the time honored discussion about Group Work or Collaboration. It has always been an issue because of some kids doing all the work, others not giving best effort, group grades versus individual grades, etc. Now things are a little more exagerrated because of the perceived need to have more collaboration with others, the thinking that this will be more critical in the workplace of the future, and web 2.0 tools that allow this to happen more easily outside of the school day. I am looking for some ideas that can help us manage this work a little better.
We have a project currently wrapping up that required groups of 4-5 students create a play script in Google Docs and then film a video of this script. The script turned out well enough, but the filming has been a challenge. Doing this outside of school brings up equity issues, compatibility issues, transportation issues, and plenty more. I would welcome any suggestions on how to manage this. How do we constructively teach collaboration and what tools exist to appropriately assess group and individual contributions to this process? Is it fair to assign work like this to occur outside of the school day? How do I involve parents as part of the solution to this?
Thanks,
Keith
Wed, 2010-01-13 19:54
#2
Instead of imposing rules or management structures, why not engage students to work in teams via intrinsice motivators.
Most students love competing. What if assignments were structured in a way that teamwork was necessary (not required, but necessary) for success in completing a competition challenge? My guess is that the right real-world incentives would motivate even the least engaged students. The trick is to find the "right" challenge and the "right" incentive.
Involve the community in judging the competition. That would provide a real-world assessment. My guess is that the public nature of student presentations would create an environment for the demonstration of the seven skills needed for the 21st Century as described by Tony Wagner.
Some of the best examples I know of these kinds of challenge structure comes from First Lego League for middle school students and Intel Science and Engineering Fairs for the high school level. These can serve as templates for structuring a in-class or in-school mini-competition.
I hope that helps.
Fri, 2010-01-08 03:05
#3
In my opinion Collaboration can not be taught to students BUT it could be developed in group work.
Wed, 2009-11-25 17:28
#4
In Chinese junior high schools we have a so-called Comprehensive Practice course for students to work in groups. Most of the activities are out side the campus with one-day arrangement. As it is a required course,every student must take part in. Every group will find a topic --or the teacher will give them a topic--to work on. They will devide the work among themselves and produce a final report in PPT or paper.
In my opinion Callaboration can not be taught to students BUT it could be developed in group work. It's important that students have some shared interest in team work.Student forum would be a good way to develop collaboration,and student-researcher is promoted in senior high schools in China , in a new course Reseasrch-Oriented Learning. Not all parents would have the possibility to get involved,but some can help if they can contribute the resource student groups need in their teamwork.
That's my idea. Hope it's helpful to you.
Grant
from Beijing
Hello there are tools out there now that can allow hundreds of students to take part in large scale collaborations and tools for small collaboration. In the Cisco Entrepreneur Institute we are using Webex to share applications real time and using video to supplement or enrich the project. I would love to show you how students could learn to use this technology and a couple others