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I took a hot minute (read: decades) to learn to foster a culture of collaboration in my classroom. I learned the most important pieces of the puzzle pretty much by coincidence.
It had taken all year, but our class had built a great community. Working together had become natural, organic, and productive. One of my favorite examples of student collaboration happened organically as a result of our work on discussion and working collaboratively. Our town had a paper mill that produces a significant amount of fibrous sludge as waste. The sludge sat in lagoons at the edge of town. Students living nearby often mentioned the smell. According to the Safety Data Sheets the mill gave me, the by-product was “not generally considered hazardous.” The mill still had to dispose of the sludge, though.
I stopped at the mill to ask about waste disposal. After an interesting conversation, the mill gave me several 5-gallon buckets of sludge. I brought the sludge, and the SDS, back to our classroom and presented it to my chemistry classes as a final project.
Together, they came up with 3 questions:
Ooooooohhh.
Look at #3: make something useful. Guess which option most student groups chose?
The processes students used in every class, with no prompting or input from me, to formulate these problems made me proud. Students listened actively to one another, re-stating and building on ideas, sometimes challenging one another’s thoughts, asking clarifying questions. They took on roles in their groups, choosing and swapping roles as appropriate. They read, they went to the library, they did web searches.
They drew all over my board and the group whiteboards.* They took photos of their boards. They set up shared docs with the pictures and descriptions and questions, so that each group member could access info and add to it at any time. They began, after asking permission to use lab equipment and referring to Safety Data Sheets for the chemicals they wanted to use. They visited with other groups to “pick their brains.” They started websites in preparation for sharing their work later on. Just observing them made me smile.
As they worked, I realized that this kind of collaboration didn’t just happen. Students had been working together all year. They practiced lab safety and lab procedures, and understood physical and chemical properties of elements and compounds. They knew how to propose their ideas, question and challenge ideas of others, how to state support and disagreement, and how to build on the idea of another student. They learned these skills in situations that were deliberately structured into lessons and activities all year, one skill at a time. The skills were used repeatedly all year as appropriate. Students were not explicitly told they were to master a skill. Yet here they were, using those skills to solve a real-world problem.
The projects were fabulous. One group chose to mitigate the odor by using citrus peels shipped in from growers to the south. Another group developed patching compounds for holes in the pavement of the student parking lot and tested each compound. Another group developed an additive for potting soil and tested several mixtures to determine ratio that supported the most plant health. Yet another group created a mixture they used to model items for jewelry. Each group created a website describing their work and shared it with the executives at the paper mill.
One student’s reflection: “By doing this project, I learned more about chemistry in the world than I did all year in class.”
Whoa.
I didn’t plan for this level of success. I didn’t expect students to pull these collaboration skills out of their sleeves and put them to use in a real situation. Sure, I had deliberately taught each individual skill and suggested certain patterns of speech when it was appropriate, but I generally did not do these things formally or by direct instruction as the main focus of a lesson. I taught them as a tool or skill or approach to completing a certain larger, more meaningful task. From this experience, I learned what was really important.
I learned that what students remember isn’t always how to do an electron configuration or calculate freezing point depression of a solution. Students will recall or look up or learn what they need to know when they need it. They need to now how to get a job done, and how to work with others to make it happen.
What are the building-block skills we used all year to make this happen?
Read on…Classroom Collaboration, Part 2
*Group whiteboards are large white shower boards from the home improvement store. Each board is cut into 6 pieces, each about 24” by 32.” I keep a dozen or so in the classroom, and students are free to use them as they wish.