Top Tips on Collaborative Learning

As we move into the new year I find myself thinking about the exam session which is rapidly approaching, and find myself asking “how can I change my revision strategies to get students to be more independent?”  The holy grail in teaching is to get students to teach each other allowing teachers to take a step back an act as facilitators.  One method that has been discussed lots over the last couple of years is collaborative learning.  In this blog I have tried to discuss my experiences with it and some of the ways that it can be used day to day.

Before teachers can foster positive interdependence, we must use new techniques, skills and strategies which involve:

• Planning activities and tasks in advance – including how they will be assessed
• Forming different kinds of groups for different purposes
• Using different methods to compose and recompose groups
• Having ground rules with students
• Training peers to teach peers
• Using a range of techniques (e.g. carousels/jigsaws)
• Taking time to give feedback on the process of learning as well as the product of learning, and how well students worked together

One key thing when starting to use collaborative earning within your lessons is how your classroom is set up.  Some of the main things which you may want to consider are:

• The objective of room arrangement is proximity. Zones of proximity can create good behaviour.  Can you stroll/loop around the room to be close to all students in the minimum of steps?
• Can all students see the whiteboard?
• Can you see the faces of all the students in the room?
• Can students access resources?
• How will you seat genders?
• How will you seat abilities?
• How will you seat for behaviour?
• Do you need flexibility to ‘snowball’ – individual/twos/pairs/ fours etc?
• Do you need to move between activities e.g. from a circle to individual writing?

The first stage in any collaborative learning activity is to enable students to gather the information for themselves.  If students must find things out for themselves, they will make more progress than if they are just spoon fed it.  This can be done in many ways.;

• Flipped learning:  Before the lesson you can let students know what they will be teaching and then set appropriate videos for them to watch. Students can then use this to make notes on the content they need in preparation for the next lesson.
• Directed reading:  Students can be given the content they will be producing a micro teaching presentation or short lesson on.  This method works most effectively when students must pick out key information from the text and then have it taken away before they start interacting with other groups.
• Use exam questions:  During revision, different groups of students can be given different exam questions that they need to explain to other students how to answer.
• Information hunt:  Before beginning the micro teaching activity, put key information around the room that students will need to use.  Give students some time in small groups to go around and gather the information they need to carry out the micro teaching activity.

The simplest form of collaborative learning is to let students work in pairs.  As most of the time students will already be sat in pairs it takes very little organisation other than being careful that you sit students next to each other that work well.  The way that I use this is to give students the opportunity to discuss the answer to any questions I’ve asked with their partner before they answer.  By doing this, students are able to reassure each other so when they are asked for an answer they do not feel like they are being put on the spot by themselves. 

Micro teaching involves students teaching each other ideas & content during a lesson.  There is lots of evidence that shows that students make the greatest amount of progress when they have to explain ideas & concepts to each other. Below I have outlined how to carry out a micro teaching activity with students and have tried to detail some of the possible preparation that needs to be in place to ensure that this activity has a meaningful impact on student progress.  Once students have collected the information they need, they need to put together a short lesson or presentation on a concept.  This can take the form of a traditional short presentation or a short lesson where students have prepared some simple resources to help them teach.  Once your students are ready set them up work around rows of tables as shown in the pictures below:

Explaining large concepts to each other:  This is something that I have only tried out with A level students but I don’t see any reason that it wouldn’t work across other year groups.  I give each group a large concept model that they need to start off by putting together.  Once students have put together a model like one shown below they need to be able to explain the model to other students.  As this activity is used for revision, I like to get students to video themselves explaining the model and then share their videos with each other to aid with revision.

Revision hexagons:  This is a method that I have used a few times during revision with students for the first last year and it really helped them make connections between lots of different concepts.  How I ran this task was to produce a hexagon for a number of different topics with different questions relating to that topic on each side.  Students then needed to add a hexagon with the answer to a sides question to each side.  They then needed to write their own question relating to that topic on the other sides of their hexagons.  Different students then add their own hexagons which results in a large amount of interconnected hexagons.  Once there is enough information for a topic down students can then make concept maps using the hexagons.

Constructing exam questions:  Due to a lack of multiple choice questions available for the new A Levels this is an activity that I have tried with my Biologists, however, I see no reason that it couldn’t be used elsewhere.  The way that I’ve used it is to give each student a revision topic to focus on, then write four multiple choice questions for that topic.  After they have all written their questions they swapped topics and had a go at answering each other’s questions.  Towards the back end of the lesson the student who wrote the questions highlight the correct answers and the other students can then mark their own answers to see how they have done.

Collaborative exam question answering:  This is something that I use at all stages of different lessons as it can be used for a starter, main, plenary or during revision.  The way that this task is carried out is to have a number of exam questions printed out, one per sheet of A3 paper.  Each pair of students start off with a question and are given two minutes to start answering it.  After this time the students need to pass their question to the next pair and they need to continue answering it.  After the point when all the questions have been answered, the last pair to answer the question need to mark it using a mark scheme and then feed back to the rest of the class on how well the question was answered.  

I hope that these ideas are different for many others out there and they have provided some inspiration for things you can do within your own lessons.

You can follow me on twitter @teacherchalky1 or on Facebook @teachlikeahero. 

Thanks for reading

D Chalk