I learned that I couldn’t just throw a group of kids together and tell them to “collaborate” and expect them to know what to do. I couldn’t just throw them an activity that’s supposed to be collaborative and expect them to know the strategies needed to make the activity work. And I certainly couldn’t just tell them what highly successful collaborative teams do and expect them to translate words into a fabulous project.

I’m also not into “teambuilding” that uses seemingly random activities intended to let people get used to working with and supporting one another.  Think: icebreakers at beginning of the year PD sessions. Ugh.  

Here’s what I’ve been doing, instead.

First, I found that students need to talk to one another to work collaboratively. Whether they are face-to-face in a classroom or are working in remote meeting rooms, before students can collaborate productively, students need to learn to talk to one another. We first learned to talk to one another about content by using short, guided inquiry discussions. Students are given a model of some sort – a few paragraphs of text, a graph or diagram, a data set – and several questions. The questions should be simple and, at first, ask students to recognize components of the model.

Next, they use the new knowledge about the model as evidence to make an inference, interpretation, ask a question, or craft a claim. They learn how to agree or disagree with one another, to challenge, support, question, or give feedback on one anothers’ ideas. 

Finally, students share with the whole class, asking for agreement or disagreement with their group’s idea, with a goal of consensus. Consensus is not a unanimous vote or a majority rule. Consensus is a general agreement. For example, a group of teachers might agree that a system is needed to encourage student to complete assignments in a timely manner. Then, a solution is sought that everyone can support, or at least live with.

Here are some specific ways to get students to talk to one another:

1. Socratic seminars – yes, I know this strategy has come, and gone. The discussion and questioning skills have not. You can give students sentence (question?)starters to guide their choices of questions. Students can use them the rest of their lives. 
2.  Learning their roles in a group – teaching students to work together and how to talk to one another saves everyone headaches. Students know what to expect from others and from themselves. You don’t waste time when your plans call for group work. Students select roles and get to work. An added bonus is that guided inquiry group plans can now be SUB PLANS!  YES!  Once your students know the process, they can (and will!) pretty much run class by themselves.  The sub need only hand out materials and call the whole group together at the times indicated in the guided inquiry. I TEACH THIS VERY EARLY IN THE YEAR using these two activities.  
3.  Jigsaw activities – helpful for talking together about content. In this activity, classically, students are grouped into initial groups. Each group is given a set of information to process and learn. Each student makes notes. Then, the groups are reorganized so that each new group has only 1 member from any original group. Students teach one another all that they learned in their initial group. 
4. Think,write,pair-share in which students partner up and think about an idea or concept, write down their thoughts, talk with their partner, and modify their writing as  they learn from one another.