I am sometimes profoundly moved by the wisdom of my students. I recall one student who once told me she was taught growing up that, “We can run faster alone, but we can run farther together.” With that simple exchange, my thinking around community and collaboration totally changed.
Under the idea of constructivism, this all makes sense. Students can try to learn the concepts and skills we give them on their own. A teacher can assign readings and papers and projects, and expect students to process these lessons and learn in their own little silos of thinking, and they can move pretty quickly. They do not have to wait up for slower moving, less motivated or distracted peers. They just get the work and move on to the next lesson.
Yet, there are so many limitations to this way of learning. For starters, collaborative learning spaces have built in support groups. If an individual gets stuck, there are others available to help problem solve. Additionally, things that might normally take an individual a long time can be done much more quickly as a group. It’s the “many hands make light work” theory. Finally, the product of a group has the possibility of being richer than the product of the individual. Groups that work well are those where the members can freely offer constructive feedback to one another, an advantage that is even greater when there is diversity within the thinking of the members.
Here are a few class community activities that I have found especially meaningful.
Jigsaws. Jigsaws are a great way to cover a lot of territory in a short time. I like to use this activity when I assign longer articles. I break students into about five groups. Each group is assigned a different segment of the article and must read and document specific parts of the text: a general summary, important details, and significance of each section. Each student in the group must record each of those pieces. Then, I re-arrange the groups so that there is a representative from each of the original groups in each of the new groups. Once in the new groups, each individual must share out the summary, important details and significance of their section.
Open Space Technology. I’ve written about this activity in the past, but it is such a fantastically, engaging way to crowd source information. The gist of the assignment is that the class will research a given topic. Then, within a shared document, they will complete a data dump after a given amount of time. Finally, the students review the data and share out one piece of evidence they find particularly interesting or useful. I like to do Open Space activities at the onset of a unit. And I am often able to pull articles and videos from their data dump later in the unit.
Google Slides. I really like using this tool for crowd sourcing a lesson. For example, in my Narratives and Video Gaming class, I used to set up a Google Slide Show and created a slide for each group in the class. For that slide, they would have to review an independently produced video game. In the Google Slide show, each group needs to populate various regions: title of the independent video game, image, summary of the game’s story, bulleted list of the “game play” and a bulleted general review of the game. Eventually, we project the slide show and each group shares out their findings. This same activity can be repeated with large pieces of paper or big white boards, which I will do from time to time just to mix it up. However, at least once a term, I like to make use of the Google Slides. I find that the quality of their work is a little bit better than with the other mediums. Regardless, students are constructing knowledge collectively.
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