If you have been following me for a while, you know one of my great passions is COLLABORATION. If you’re just joining me, check out some of my past articles on collaborative learning.  They will set the foundation for your understanding in this article. 

Every collaborative exercise should have 3 essential components, and I’m going to spend some time today diving a little deeper into the first critical component: Frontload. 

This process can be most easily equated with your direct instruction or guided practice in a typical lesson, but it has its differences.  During the frontloading process, you are discussing expectations for the collaborative learning exercise with your students and “loading them up” with all of the information they will need to be successful during the collaboration.  To have the most success with this component, there are a few essential actions that need to take place:

1. Place your learners into teams: The key to collaboration is that your students are completing the entire activity in TEAMS.  Notice I didn’t say GROUPS.  A team is synergistic; the coming together of different strengths and gifts for an outcome that is greater than what could have been done by a single student. A group is just students put together to accomplish a task, maybe through working together, but more likely not. 

Here are some guiding questions to help you divide your students into teams:

• First, you need to decide how big you want your teams (the ideal size is 3). 

• Do you want to allow them to choose their own teams or will you choose for them?  

• Are you going to group intentionally or randomly? 

• Where are the teams going to work? 

• Do you need to rearrange desks or move things around in your classroom before their activity can begin?  

• How are you going to get the classroom space set up and when?

Think through all of these things ahead of time and explain them clearly to your students so they know what to expect and can follow through on their part. 

2. Lead a discussion of the social skills and collaborative skills they will need to demonstrate to be successful during this activity.  

Here are a few skills to get the conversation started:

• Have one person speaking at a time (see my other blog post for more on this)

• Listen to all of your teammates’ ideas

• Problem solve within your team

• Stay on task

• Manage your time well

• Contribute ideas and participate with your team

The more you do collaborative exercises, the less time you will have to spend explaining each of these in depth.  But the first few times, you definitely want to spend a lot of time here, modeling these behaviors and discussing examples and non-examples so students have a clear understanding of what these skills look and sound like so they can replicate them during their collaboration. 

3. Distribute project sheets and/or rubrics and discuss them with the class. You can do this a few different ways.  

• Option 1: Have teams first read through the rubrics and/or project sheets in their teams and discuss what they think each component means and write down any questions they have about it.  Then bring the class together and answer questions.  Have a discussion about the expectations for the project and how the rubric should be used. This option works well for upper elementary students.  

• Option 2: Read through the rubric aloud as the students follow along with you.  You can explain each item on the rubric or project sheet so the students understand what is expected of them. Sometimes it’s valuable to ask students to highlight key words on the rubric as you are going over it. 

Wait a minute... did I hear you say you don’t have rubrics for your collaborative activities?  Well I would highly recommend you start using them.  It is easy to create your own rubrics for any collaborative activity.  (Blog article coming soon!)  Rubrics are essential when facilitating collaborative learning because it acts as your students’ road map throughout the process.  They can continually refer back to it as they work and use it as a checklist when they finish to make sure they completed all the essential tasks. 

4. Appoint roles or allow students to choose their role in the team (if applicable). I would highly recommend using roles, especially for longer, more complex projects/activities.  It gives every student a job to do and creates a balance of work within the team so one person doesn’t end up doing all the work (we know how that goes).  Here are some common roles that I have used with my students in the past.  These can be adjusted or adapted to suit the developmental needs of your students:

• Artistic Director: Ensures all artistic ideas are heard

• Leader: Solves problems in their team & gathers supplies needed

• Quality Control: Edits text for correct spelling and punctuation and double-checks to ensure team followed all the elements listed on the rubric (or really double checks any part of the project with the rubric for quality assurance)

• Material Monitor: Gathers materials needed for activity & ensures supplies are returned and/or put away at the end

• Appointer/Facilitator: Calls on one team member at a time to talk

Quick note: if you decide to let your students pick their own roles, set a TIMER and tell them they have to decide within that time or you will choose for them.  Otherwise, this process can drag on. 

Wow, that sounds like a lot, you may be saying to yourself.  Maybe I should just skip this part and have my students jump right into the project. Well let me tell you why your time spent on frontloading is NOT wasted. This process equips your students with the tools and resources they will need to be successful and independently problem solve throughout the project. This will free you up to properly Facilitate the lesson, without spending your time and energy putting out fires everywhere. When students have a clear understanding of what is expected of them, they will be able to carry out the process more effectively and the end result will be better and their learning will be deeper. 

Well, we’ve only just gotten started.  The real fun begins with the Facilitate portion of the collaborative activity. Look out for that article coming soon!

1. What part of this process do you think would be the most valuable?

2. How do you feel about implementing this into your class collaboration?