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Real Collaboration:

Are 2 heads better than 1?

July 9, 2019

http://bit.ly/MCI-RC19

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Agenda

Introductions: Judi Fusco & Sarah Hampton

Stand up! Introductions of you

Review Resources & Discussion

Working Time: Create the Resource YOU need

Share with the group

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Judi Fusco jfusco@digitalpromise.org

Short story: Cognitive Psychologist → Online Communities (kids then teachers) → Deepening Learning using technology (and not using technology) → Learning Scientist who works with teachers & tries to bridge the gap between research and practice

Longer story:

More than 22 years on my journey
Helped start www.tappedin.org
Taught in Ed.D. Program & learned a ton -- my Ed.D. students really pushed
Worked with amazing researchers and designers
Currently working in CIRCL Community & with CIRCL Educators
Boundary Crosser

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Sarah Hampton sarahwhampton@gmail.com

Mentor to elementary students for three summers through Americorps
Tutor throughout high school and college
MAED in Curriculum and Instruction--Selected as Teacher of Promise from program
10+ years of formal teaching experience in secondary math and science
CIRCL Educator since 2016
Speaker at International STEAM Conference/ITEEA in 2018
4 Blog Posts for NCTM in 2019
2x ORISE Lesson Plan Winner
Teacher partner with Earth Echo International

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Stand up!

K-3, 4-6, 7-8, High School, Coach, Principal, Technology, Publisher, Higher Ed

Quick round of introductions -- your name, where you’re from, and your favorite book.

STEM, Humanities, Multiple Subject, Arts/Creative

I rarely have my students work together, I have my students work together a fair amount of time, I have my students work collaboratively all the time

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What is collaboration?

Collaboration versus cooperation

Cooperation is more about getting a job done and students divide the task. This could lead to a collaborative activity if time is built in for this to occur.

Collaboration as conceptual change--really working together, in a shared mental space.

https://circleducators.org/unpacking-collaboration/

Sarah: I used to think collaboration was occuring any time I grouped students together in class, but that’s just not the case. Lots of things can be occurring group work, and, now that I know what to look for, a lot of it isn’t collaboration. Consider two of the most often confused terms, for example, collaboration and cooperation. When students cooperate, they divide up tasks between team members, work independently, and put all the pieces together to finish the task. When students collaborate, they’re mutually engage in a “coordinated effort to work on the task together.” They have to be talking together, thinking together, and negotiating shared meaning in order to arrive at a new, common understanding together. That’s collaboration as conceptual change. I like how Mary Burns said it in Edutopia’s blog, 5 Strategies to Deepen Student Collaboration

“In collaborative activities, we want to ensure that students don’t just occupy the same physical space but that they share an intellectual space--that they learn more, do more, and experience more together than they would alone.”

Judi: a shared mental space where two people are really trying to understand one another.

Intersubjectivity

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Discussion Topics

When to collaborate

Types of tasks

Cognitive demand

Collaboration as a norm

The magic of collaboration

Group Size & Make up

Norms/Scaffolds/Roles

Process

Maintenance

Assessing Collaboration

Role of Technology

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Discussion -- When to Collaborate

What types of tasks?

How do you decide?

Low cognitive demand versus high cognitive demand.

When a task doesn’t require the mental power of two heads, collaboration isn’t a good use of time.

https://circleducators.org/when-to-collaborate/

Everything you do in your classroom should be intentional based on your instructional goal. What are you trying to accomplish? Do you want to do a quick check for basic understanding of vocabulary? Do you want students to repeat a process you demonstrated? Or do you want them to assimilate their existing understanding and apply it to a new situation? All of these activities have a place in the classroom, but they serve different purposes and require different depths of thinking.

Collaboration is a very powerful activity, but it works best when you need the power of another person’s brain to help you. Otherwise, the overhead of working with another person is not worth it. So it only makes sense to make the effort of figuring out how to work with another person when the instructional task is very large or complex.

Using your prior knowledge to evaluate a new situation is a high demand cognitive task (and a task often required during challenge based learning!) and therefore is a good candidate for collaborative activity. Students will almost certainly benefit from discussing their thoughts with others as they clarify and strengthen their arguments. That makes tasks like that the sweet spot for collaboration.

Quick vocab checks or I do/You do tasks don’t demand as much deep thinking. That means that independent or cooperative learning are more appropriate in those cases.

So, two heads are only better than one when a task requires the mental power of both heads. Otherwise,collaboration isn’t a good use of time.

Bonus if time: According to Less is more: Teachers’ influence during peer collaboration, “When a student models a strategy that makes an argument more convincing or makes the discussion run more smoothly, other group members are stimulated to appropriate the strategy.” In fact, in their study and several others like it, students were more likely to benefit from hearing other students think aloud and seeing other students model strategies than anything the teacher said or did!

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Discussion: Collaboration as a Norm

Set up collaboration as a norm in your classroom

It takes time to set up norms, processes, roles, and use of question prompts. They have to be understood and internalized.

Students don’t naturally know how to collaborate.
A lot of students have experienced bad collaborative projects.
Different schools have different cultural norms.
Create norms around collaboration as process that makes products better and learning deeper.

Group Selection

Help build trust among students to work together. (Student selected groups?)

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Discussion: The magic of collaboration...

Going back to the idea that collaboration is about conceptual change

The talk that occurs within a group is related to what happens in the heads of the students. If students don’t reach a shared mental space, then the magic of collaboration doesn’t happen.

Group selection is very important as creating shared mental space really requires trust among the group members.

In a minute, we’ll discuss grouping and also some process for groups that might help to create the magic.

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Discussion: Group size & Make up

Group Size

Think about size in relation to the task and the purpose.

Brainstorming?
Digging in to a concept?
Giving/getting feedback?

Group make up

Consider power dynamics -- discuss power dynamics
Same sex group? Same culture? No child who is not in dominant group alone in a group
Roles can help -- Ensure non dominant kids are not always in supporting roles

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Discussion: How to make the magic happen

More on how to make magic happen-- important process moments include:

Helping students make their thinking visible← really requires trust
Starting the discussion
Asking clarifying questions
Summarizing what has been learned
Asking if there might be another point of view

Researching for more information

Working to put it all back together and reach consensus

What else?

All the while, a group needs to work on working together -- or maintaining the group. Maintenance isn’t “conceptual change” but it is imperative to the safe space necessary for conceptual change.

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Discussion: Process & Maintenance

Processes for Group Maintenance

Sensing group feelings

If students can’t keep track of group feelings on their own, an individual exit ticket asking students what’s working and not working may be helpful. A shared chart to designate how the group is working maybe helpful.

Making sure all are involved in the discussion, have a voice and are heard

Norms around time-keeping, turn-taking, asking clarifying questions, and what to do when the group reaches an impasse are important
Equity Maps

Maintenance and Process (previous slide) need to work together.

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Discussion and Resources to work with

How do you know it’s working? Rubric--adapt it to your needs?

https://32dkl02ezpk0qcqvqmlx19lk-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/NTN-Collab-Rubric-High-School-Individual.pdf

Classroom Talk discussion prompts from STEM Teaching Tools--adapt?

Talk-Culture-Constructive-Conversation-Skills_3.24.17.pdf

Talk_Resource_Cards_TalkScience_AllCardsonOnePag e.pdf

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Discussion

How to grade?

Group project grade versus individual…

Consider student perspective…other students free ride, I do all work; I don’t like my group mates; I don’t like to work with others

Technology to make supporting collaboration easier

Google Docs

https://ziteboard.com/

https://equitymaps.com/

https://voicethread.com

Biz tools (lots of planning and coordination tools)

Software that you normally use with kids working together -- really work together -- pair programming.

How you grade the first project you do with students doesn’t have to be how you grade the later ones.

Students who wanted to work together said they were happy to make the assignment different because of the group aspect.

Sarah: Ziteboard and Google Docs share some similar features. They both allow students to edit at the same time and they don’t require students to be in the same location to collaborate. Judi and I have never physically met, but we’ve been meaningfully collaborating for three years using Google Docs through comments and responses with intermittent video chats. Ziteboard is a little friendlier for tablets because students can draw in addition to typing.

Sarah: Desmos and PhET Simulations are two resources that I love for teaching math and science. Recently I’ve been using them more collaboratively. The quality of student thinking improves as they experience the simulation together and make sense of what they notice together to come to a shared understanding.

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Topics to consider (for interested groups)

Other things you and your students may want to discuss:

Taking risks -- how does everyone feel about risk taking?
Listening actively and generously

Asking good questions

Pressing for deeper understanding
Giving good feedback
Building on others ideas and inviting others to participate

3 before me?

Taking and giving time to think & process ideas
Sharing ideas in progress and revising your ideas
Presume good intentions of others in your group
Be accountable to yourself and the group

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Potential Roles Starter List (for interested groups)

Potential Roles or assets you can create to help (people or paper)

Discussion starter
Clarifying questions
Time-keeper
Turn-taker (list of all names, what they said, and what happened)

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What do you want to create?

What do you need for collaboration?

What kinds of activities are you thinking about?

Rubric for teacher
Checklist for teacher to use as you listen to students’ talk
Rubric for students
Poster for students
Role support / Question prompts -- when students are stuck what are things you could say? (could be for teacher or students)
Scaffolds for supporting group maintenance
Explore equity maps or create a rubric/tool to support students without tech

Some other needed resource but not listed above

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Share

What did you or are you going to create?

What did you learn?

What are you going to keep thinking about?

(Share a document with me. I’d love to see what you’re thinking and doing.)

(Slide 21 and 22 if time)

Closing Thoughts

There are a lot of things to consider (see slide 7) but some of the things we hope you’ll remember are:

Designing the right activity for collaboration is so important.
Is it collaboration or cooperation?
Does the task warrant collaboration?
Trust is critical to the collaborative process.
MCs associated with session

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Other Resources

One of the best articles that Sarah and I read about collaboration didn’t even have the word collaboration in the title.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fGek5Vqw6rGKlTeVfbYvDAP3D8F6jGCM/view 

 discusses statements of superiority and inferiority, who talks, who initiates sequences, whose ideas are  taken up and publicly recognized -- gives a lot to think about when you read about collaboration from a student perspective

Old but good tips http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/Randy/tipoForGroups.html

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Other Resources 2

Hampton, S., (2018). Unpacking Collaboration. CIRCLEducators Blog. Retrieved from https://circleducators.org/unpacking-collaboration/

Hampton, S., (2018). When to Collaborate. CIRCLEducators Blog. Retrieved from https://circleducators.org/when-to-collaborate/

Roschelle, J., (1992). Learning by Collaborating: Convergent Conceptual Change.

Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2(3) 235-276.

Roschelle, J., Suthers, D., & Grover, S. (2014). CIRCL Primer: Collaborative Learning. In CIRCL Primer Series. Retrieved from http://circlcenter.org/collaborative-learning/

Vega, V., & Terada, Y. (2012). Research supports collaborative learning. Edutopia. Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/stw-collaborative-learning-research

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Challenge Based Learning and Collaboration

http://monitorwater.org/post/sullins-academy-takes-on-sdg-6-with-eewc�

The Challenge

Research the worldwide water crisis and then design and build a potential solution to help with United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #6: Ensure access to water and sanitation for all

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Link removed because workshop is over.