User:Collaborationnation

‘What is collaboration?’ Collaboration is a practice that we are now beginning to see the importance of as we work towards centralizing it in our education system. In its simple form Collaboration is all about working together to achieve goals.

Collaboration is about challenging a group to adjust their thoughts, behaviours and efforts to reach a group decided goal. In contrast to co-operation, collaboration focuses on combining individual ideas and opinions to construct a concept. It is more than just working together; it is an agreement of what needs to be done to achieve what they need to. The process of collaboration is based on a strong, working relationship between two or more people who depend on each other to achieve goals. According to Australia Research Alliance for Children and Youth (ARACY), reducing duplication of information, opening up more opportunities and using limited resources more affectively and encouraging efficiency and effectiveness. ARACY define a group working in collaboration by the intensity of their relationship, which is the ways in which they depend on each other to achieve things and the way that the members of the group communicate and divide the amount of work and power.

Collaboration is strongly linked to the idea that learning is a ‘social process’, used to help learners do things that they were unable to do without social support. It is also followed closely to the idea of scaffolding, where together as group students build and expand upon a thought until all learners have grasped the concept and they can they expand it together. An example of using this in the classroom is a situation where a question is asked and getting the students to answer it.

In previous times, a learner would have been expected to write down the answer silently in their own books; however this is often hard for young people and can also be quite daunting and intimidating. A way in which collaboration could be used in this situation is to ask the question and instead of encouraging individual work, allowing the students to discuss and develop an idea or answer in groups. This allows the students to make sure their thoughts are clear and concise before the put them down on paper and prompts multi perspective thinking. There are many ways to foster collaboration within a classroom in regards to humanities and English. Group projects and group discussion, as mentioned, are great ways to engage students with one another in a collaborating sense because it forces them to discuss each other’s points of view and take into consideration different points. (This is something that is often missing within cooperation groupings.) Giving each small group a discussion topic first allows students to voice their own particular opinion on the subject matter before starting work on the project, while in comparison just setting out a particular task often leads to delegation and uneven workloads within small groups. Within English subjects such a discussion is often a necessary part of assessment in regards to approaching a topic differently, especially when the small groups are a combination of learners with completely different learning styles. Within humanities subjects’ discussion and debate if often a necessary part of an assessment process; collaboration creates access to completely different (and often challenging) ideas, some of which many students would not perhaps considered as an appropriate answer to their particular topic otherwise.

However, getting your students to collaborate together isn't as simple as putting people in a group and telling them to get on with a project. It requires consideration on the part of a teacher and understanding about the students you have. A starting point would be for students to be arranged in small groups, the size of which is determined by table size and get the students used to group work. Modelling the appropriate values of communication and scaffolding the lesson plans so that the students begin to rely and trust each other's ideas and work together towards common goals. Once the routine is established with the students the classic environment of group work need no longer be held to.

For example, working with an English class who are studying Shakespeare, students could be assigned a task to design a web-space in relation to a text. Each student, having already learned to rely and trust each other can work together in order to work towards a goal together. As a safeguard there are programs that you could designate that would allow you to monitor who is contributing what to the content and help you assist where there are communication breakdowns. Another example, working in a History class who are discussing the first world war, have these collaborative groups each discuss a topic that the team needs to research, such as the reasons behind the first world war. Have them then run an online forum where they can discuss the topic with people from around the world. As a teacher, you can invite others in your field to ask learners questions and as each person will have a student handle you can assist the students with their forums, making sure that the collaboration and participation is occurring and then as a class, pool the collective information into a dialogue about the topics.

Resources

http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwltc/howto/enablestudentcollab.htm Reference: ARACY- What is collaboration? (Link on LMS)

THIS WAS A COLLABORATION OF IDEAS CREATED BY MONIQUE, NANCY, MELISSA AND MARK