Collaboration is Not Group Work!

What did I learn?
I learned a lot about what collaboration looks like in the 21st Century; it is not used in the same way educators have used it in the past.  In my experience, when teachers told students they were going to "collaborate" they meant that students were going to work in groups.  In truth, collaboration is much more than group work or even working together; this is just the first level of collaboration.  There are other factors that need to be considered in order to reach the highest level of "collaboration" in the 21st Century.

• Shared Responsibility - There needs to be a common product or design with all members mutually responsible for the outcome.
• Substantive Decisions - In addition to shared responsibility, important issues need to be resolved together that have to do with the content, process or product.
• Interdependent - In addition to shared responsibility and making substantive decisions, participation of all group members in required (and not by dividing and conquering).  There is individual and group accountability because the task cannot be completed without all members' contributions.

What changes might I implement based on my new knowledge?

I am not currently in the classroom, but I am tasking myself with learning more about the six 21st Century Competencies in order to better support teachers at my site in my role as Instructional Coach. While I work with all disciplines, mathematics is my background and where I feel most comfortable.  The teachers at my site are already at a level 1 (students are required to work in pairs or groups) almost on a daily basis.  I think in order to get students and teachers to the top level the mathematical task that is assigned needs to be flexible enough that it can be broken into individual parts that eventually need to come together to solve the complete task.  For instance, if students were given a task to find the total distance traveled on a map, each student would be responsible for finding a portion of the distance (the group members would decide who finds what portion of the distance) and then bring their "distance" back to the whole group in order to find the total distance.

I think it is important to note that it is not necessary to get to the top level of collaboration with every task.  If a task lends itself to be broken down in this way that is one thing but teachers should not feel the pressure to break up a task just to reach the top level of collaboration as it would become superficial. Not every activity or mathematical task will lend itself to collaboration and that's okay.