Depending on the teacher, student collaboration can look and sound calm and creative........or chaotic and scary.........or even calmingly chaotic and so creative it's scary.
We tend to fear what we don't understand. One of my favorite questions I had to answer this summer during Marzano training was, "What does this look and sound like?"
In order to answer I had to first understand what my unit plan looked like in action. To achieve the learning goal/targets, what would I see and hear my students doing?
Since my unit adventure was filled with student collaboration, this thought-provoking exercise helped me understand better what student collaboration really was.
And I found out, thanks to both Marzano, and the movie, Dan in Real Life, that it's not so much a process or event as it is an ability.
Collaboration is an ability to use academic vocabulary while working together to explain, analyze, evaluate, infer, rethink, retool, create, design, illuminate, critique and question.*
And this ability to collaborate sounds pretty familiar, as it's a highly-valued skill in the real world.
I did not learn to collaborate in school, and the first thing I was told when I graduated and got my first job was, "Forget everything you learned in school, it doesn't apply in the real world."
It is my job to make sure that this isn't true for any of my students, and that all of them are gifted collaborators..
*http://www.teachthought.com/learning/project-based-learning/project-based-learning-cheat-sheet-authentic-learning/
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