Collaborative work encourages students to join forces to achieve a common goal. Discover the benefits it brings and the activities that can be planned.
What is collaborative work?
Throughout this process, students interact and contribute their skills, knowledge, and effort. “The completion of the task depends on the personal commitment each student makes. Communication and respect for the contributions of their classmates are also important pillars,” says Esteban Gabriel Santana, coordinator of the Communications Department of the Educational Innovation Service of the Ministry of Education in the Canary Islands.
Why bring collaborative work into the classroom
This learning process works equally well at all educational levels and across all subjects. The only difference is that the complexity of the experiences increases as students grow. Therefore, collaborative work can be applied interchangeably to both scientific subjects and the humanities and linguistics. As Ángels Soriano, a Language and Literature teacher at the Martí Sorolla II School (Sorolla Group) in Valencia, explains: “The focus is not only on the content. It’s also about making it impactful for the student so they can be productive, take action, and propose actions that improve their daily lives.” Collaborative work thus provides several advantages to the teaching-learning process. For example, student empowerment is fostered, and it’s possible to work with them on certain social skills and abilities, such as empathy and collaboration. And why not link curricular content to environmental issues, such as those focused on the Sustainable Development Goals? “This will allow us to develop the most important skill, from my point of view: learning to learn, building strategies that students will use in the future to unlearn and relearn according to the characteristics of the environment,” Soriano points out. Furthermore, the very nature of this methodology provides the classroom with the opportunity for students to join forces to achieve a common goal; it also promotes greater autonomy among them when generating both group and individual initiatives. This is the belief of Santana, who believes collaborative work helps—in another sense—for teachers to more appropriately address the diversity of students with different learning rhythms and styles.
Recommendations for teachers
When implementing a collaborative work experience, there are several recommendations to keep in mind. Planning is vital, as is structuring the project into phases, the objectives to be achieved, the skills to be developed, and the techniques chosen to make the experience a reality. “It’s very important to organize the activity well to fit the available time,” recalls Esperanza Manzanares, a computer science teacher at the Ingeniero de la Cierva High School in Patino (Murcia).
Furthermore, it’s important to start from the school curriculum, the assessment criteria, and the students’ own reality. In this way, teachers can understand the students’ knowledge of the topics and can encourage them to research and explore the most appropriate strategies for solving the challenges they face. They can also use digital tools specifically designed for collaborative learning, such as those included in Google Apps for Education.
Proposals for working with students
What activities and exercises can teachers develop around collaborative work? Manzanares suggests group tutoring (to deepen the classroom environment) and the “Learning by Coding” technique for students to help each other. “What we achieve is that each classmate supervises the work another has completed, and that together they reach a final solution, as it is a group project,” he explains.
Soriano, for his part, has developed two interesting experiences. In the project ” How Do You Sing to Love?”, his secondary and high school students have collaboratively worked on gender equality and suggested various proposals for an egalitarian society through music. Meanwhile, the Climate Change Project is structured around the Sustainable Development Goals.
Project-based work is also a good way to foster collaborative work through initiatives like a school radio. Through this medium, kids work as a team, preparing recordings and audio, creating scripts and outlines, etc. In other words, they work together in a coordinated manner to ensure the program is successful.
Skills and abilities
Improving oral and written expression skills, fostering the abilities required for reasoning, debating, and problem-solving, and delving deeper into so-called soft skills such as those related to teamwork, emotional development, and creativity… These are some of the skills and abilities that students benefit from this teaching-learning methodology.
Leadership, teamwork skills, conflict resolution, and communication skills, among others, are skills that are almost more important in a job interview than scientific or technical knowledge demonstrated by an academic record. “All these skills and abilities are not acquired by working individually in the classroom, memorizing, and studying for an exam. They are achieved by introducing other ways of organizing students into the classroom, but above all, by fostering their autonomy and collaborative work,” Santana concludes.
