Reflection on classroom collaboration

I am a firm believer in student collaboration. In our language classroom, the main goal is communication. I try to foster a climate of collaboration from day one. Students are required to work together in pairs and small groups on a daily basis to complete small tasks. I try to guide them to make the most out of the opportunities that they have for collaboration. Below is a graphic that an online colleague (Heather Witten) shared with me. She calls it "Success in Spanish" but it is applicable to most subjects. This past year I  posted this on my class Moodle page and discussed it at the beginning of the school year. 

                             

When I think back over my teaching career I can remember many times when I had students work on projects together in groups. Some attempts were complete failures and others were quite successful. A few common problems that I encountered in the past were logistical issues (one student from the group is absent and the other members claim that that person has the paper that they need in order to move forward), unequal distribution of the workload (one student ends up doing the majority of the work), and personality conflicts between group members. I have addressed these issues in a variety of ways. The logistical issues have been resolved by having students collaborate using web tools such as Google Docs so that they all have access to their project. The unequal distribution of work is improved by assigning specific roles to students within their groups. Finally, I try to address the personality clashes at the beginning of the year by explaining that students will be required to work with various partners throughout the year. I tell my students that I am helping to prepare them for the workforce where they will inevitably have to work with people they may not like from time to time.

I am excited to use some of the online resources that we learned about this week to improve future group projects in my classroom. I want to knock down the walls of our classroom and go global! I think that Skype, The Global classroom and Wikispaces for education all look promising. I have a lot of work to do before heading back to school in August.