CollaborationThis month's focus was on collaboration. This was a fun session, lots of movement and discussion. We feel that in a classroom, when collaboration is strong, it will seem a bit noisy and even messy at time, but that's ok! The best we can do as presenters, is to show/model those same situations with our teachers. The PowerPoint presentation that was used is below.
The Warm-upTo get the session started we played a collaborative game for a warm-up. This strategy is called a barrier game. This game is an information gap activity. One learner has the information the other learner needs. Information for this game was found HERE. The directions were pretty simple. One person had an image of a food web. They were to describe the image to their partner, who then in turn try to draw it. I love this strategy because it has great ability to help students learn to communicate academically. They are forced to use vocabulary. They must learn to give clear directions. The other partner is then working on their listening skills, which I think we can all agree is a life-long skill that we can all be better at. Below are the directions that were used and the image, along with sentence stems that were give to one of the partners. Consensus Placemat StrategyThis amazing strategy was found on Creative Classroom Tools blog. You can find the particular article HERE. Since showing this to teachers, I have used this strategy in multiple other PD sessions and have also heard great responses from our teachers who have tried it out. It is a keeper! So what is consensus placemat? It is a cooperative learning tool that allows students respond independently and then build collaboration with students to come to a consensus answer. Here are a few examples. The one on the left is the is a screenshot from a PowerPoint, if you wanted students to collaborate on a shared PowerPoint document online. Here is an example. The one on the right is from Creative Classroom Tools website. The teacher begins with posing a question. Each student then writes their individual response around the edges. This should be done without collaboration. After each student has had a chance to write a response, then the group comes together to discuss each response. When they are finished they will then come up with a collective responses or consensus to write in the middle. Graphic organizer carouselMy partner Meghan Alcorn came up with this strategy and I think it is brilliant. We have now used it in multiple high school classes, and the teachers really like it. The first thing to do is gather or create multiple graphic organizers for the speicific content you are working on. Draw the graphic organizers (without the answers) on large sheets of butcher paper and laminate. Then the answers should be printed or written on cards and laminated as well. You can hang the graphic organizers around the room, or you can place them in stations. Randomly pass out the answer cards and tell students to try to find the missing graphic organizer that matches their particular answer. Let me tell you, this isn't as easy as it seems. The results are just what we were looking for: collaboration. We placed multiple graphic organizers around the room about classifying quadrilaterals. Each teacher was given a card, and they had to work together, talk it out, problem solve, and think critically to find where the correct answers went. Another recent example was from our English 2 classes. They were studying To Kill a Mockingbird. So I created 5 graphic organizers that would help them review major content areas for their test. We had organizers for theme, characters, symbols, relationships, and plots. I think the possibilities are endless for all subject matters. Pass the StoryWe have seen this collaborative strategy before: each student adds to a part of the story. We made a twist to it by creating vocabulary cards that have to be used in each pass of the story. This helps students stay on topic and helps them with vocabulary acquisition. Here are the directions on the left. In our particular session, we gave groups of teachers vocabulary from an astronomy unit: axis, rotation, solar system, planet, and revolution. Each teacher began writing their story with the vocabulary word given to them. After a minute, they passed their cards to the right and had to add a new sentence with the new vocabulary term. Continue until completing all terms. You could then have students trade and comment on each other's story. The Wrap UpWe used this Connect the Dots strategy to wrap-up our learning for the day. Information for the strategy is from Lead4Ward. You can the information HERE. I hope you found some interesting strategies to use for collaboration. Please share them with your colleagues. Let me know what you think!
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