Do you want a classroom of students that collaborate with one another on a daily basis? I would guess that you are saying “yes” right now! We all want our students to collaborate with one another daily, but too often we just assume they will know what collaboration looks like. It is important that we teach, model and give our students time to collaborate with one another. It doesn’t matter if it is your 1st week of school or you are half way through the school year, it’s never too late to build a collaborative classroom. Check out these 5 ideas for helping make collaboration part of your every day routine!
- Collaboration Norms Anchor Chart: One day in January a couple years ago, I realized that my students did not know what it really meant to collaborate and have discussions together. As I had done many other times with other topics, I decided we needed to have a classroom discussion on what it truly meant to collaborate. I wanted to make sure that the discussion did not end there. So, with my students help, we decided to create collaboration norms. Check out the anchor chart above for an example of what this could look like! Remember to make your students part of creating and deciding on the discussion or collaboration norms in your class.
- Make Collaboration Part of your Class Expectations: I highly recommend that when you are creating your expectations for the year with your students that you make sure collaboration is on that list. This will help your students see the importance of it and that it is part of your class culture. I know we all have our students collaborate in different ways every day (turn and talk, group discussions, partner activities, etc.), but we want to make sure our students understand the importance. This is one way from the 1st day of school you can make sure that your students know the importance of collaboration!
- Role Playing or Scenarios in Morning Meetings: One of my favorite ways to model and teach my students what it looks like to collaborate with one another is by role playing with scenarios. I create a scenario that I have seen in class (make sure to change it a little to not embarrass students) or create a scenario that I could see my students having. Then, I ask my students to show the class how they would handle that situation. Students love role playing and seeing what it looks like to collaborate helps them truly understand!
- “I Love What I am Seeing…”: In the corner of my bulletin board, I have the phrase “I ❤️️ What I am Seeing”. When students are having discussions and collaborating, I walk around and observe. Under that phrase on the board, I put either phrases I hear my students say (I look for discussion norm phrases) or something I see them do that shows they are collaborating. For example, if I hear a student say, “Let’s make sure everyone gets a turn to share.”, I may write that on the board. Then, after a couple things are written on the board, I stop and briefly point out these ideas to the class. After that, as I walk around, I often hear and see what I pointed out happening while my students continue to collaborate.
- Discussion Prompt Sticks: A couple years back, I started using these discussion prompt sticks for whole class discussions and have found over the years that they are a great way to help students when having discussions in groups too. These just help start discussions and help students use academic vocabulary and text evidence in their discussions. Click here to read my instagram post for more ideas on how to use discussion prompt sticks!
I hope you are walking away from this blog post with at least one new idea to try in your classroom to build a collaborative classroom. Continue to look for ways to discuss, point out and make sure collaboration is done every day in your classroom. This not only helps build your classroom community, but will help your students academically too. Remember, your students learn from one another and need to be given multiple opportunities a day to do that!
Happy Collaborating!
