3 Common Mistakes that Lead to Epic Fails in Collaborative Learning... and How to Avoid Them

by Allie Sheridan West

After reading that collaboration is the most effective technique to engage students, you just knew you had to try it in your classroom. You even spent all weekend planning the PERFECT group activity. The big day arrives and you divide the students into groups, anxiously awaiting the miracle of collaboration.

Instead, two students refuse to work together and one student has completely taken over his group. Another group is already on step 5 within the first three minutes (how?!!), their neighbors are talking loudly about the basketball game, and someone is definitely snoring. Quiet tears fall into your now hours old coffee. WHERE DID IT GO SO WRONG?

If this has ever been you, the frustration with collaborative learning is real (and really painful!), but it doesn’t have to be. The switch to collaborative learning in a classroom isn’t always seamless because students are learning HOW to learn in a group.  There are, however, a few common mistakes you can avoid that will make your transition to a collaborative classroom much smoother.

Mistake 1: You didn’t plan your groups 

Randomly assigning students may seem like the best, or easiest, way to populate a group with diverse learners. However, randomly assigning students does not take into account the knowledge we have of our students or their learning needs. Groups should be thoughtfully constructed, pairing students with complementary strengths and needs together. This allows groups to have the intellectual and emotional resources they need to build on each other and create a quality product. Don’t be afraid to mix ability levels, as each student will bring a unique ingredient to the group that will help each of the members grow;both you and their group members will be surprised what some students can contribute

Mistake 2:   Your students didn’t understand the TASK

As teachers we often equate well constructed steps, or directions, with a well-defined student task. In the case of collaborative learning this simply isn’t true. For example, directions for a collaborative task may look something like 1) Individually read your assigned paragraph 2) take turns discussing the major points of the article 3) decide as a group on the 3 most important points to present to the class. While these steps describe the procedure that students must follow to complete the task, it offers almost no guidance on HOW students should accomplish the task, or what a success looks like along the way. 

Collaborative learning tasks need to have clear objectives and methods for each stage of the activity, a specified “what am I doing right now and how am I doing it”, particularly while students are learning to embrace the collaborative method.  

Using phrases like “discuss” or “decide”  may be too open ended or vague for students just learning to work together. Consider giving them question stems to use or providing a round-robin format to make sure that all students are given an opportunity to participate. 

Examples:

• “What evidence can you present for/against...
• Compare/contrast _______ and _________
• To summarize this article I would say ___________
•  Create discrete steps and goals for each phase of the group work 

Examples :

• “after each member has typed two main ideas into the document”, 
• “circle share for 3 minutes straight, if a group member is struggling with something to to share then…”
• Model acceptable outcomes for students and provide clear exemplars of learning targets so that students understand how to meet the expectation.

Mistake 3: The students needed roles

Think about the last time you were put into a group with your coworkers with no clear guidelines or rules: the amount of time that was wasted waiting for someone to lead the task, the frustration with the SAME loudmouth dominating the conversation and the general discomfort you felt about being perceived as a control freak or, conversely, a non-contributor. All of these feelings are real for our students, and are often amplified by teenage self-consciousness

Students need to have specific jobs and responsibilities, and their role needs to be well-defined. Students are more likely to participate when they understand their role within the group, and how they are expected to contribute to the overall task. Having jobs  not only equitably divides tasks, but  may help shy students engage as they are given the authority to act by a title, and reign in students that tend to dominate social situations. Specifying  jobs also creates a system of mutual accountability; peers can help group struggling members get back on track instead of just tattling to the teacher.

Try roles like:

• recorder, 
• fact-checker 
• tie-breaker

A final thought:

None of these is the magic cure-all that will have your students waltz into the classroom day one, sit down quietly at their stations and begin having the discourse of Socrates or Aristotle. Like all great things, collaborative learning takes time for teachers and students alike to master. Be patient. Celebrate small victories. Course correct as needed. Learn from your mistakes and help the students learn from theirs. One day you won’t even remember crying into your cold coffee over the dumpster fire that was your first attempt at collaborative learning.

Ready to Try It?

We're always more likely to try something when we write an actual goal. Here are some to get you started:

• During the first quarter, I will use at least one collaborative activity with my students per week.
• During the first quarter, I will do a project-based learning project with students in which they collaborate.

Hampton City Schools Teachers

Do you work in Hampton City Schools? Great! Here are some ideas for how to give students choices using the Instructional Technique Library. (If you don't work at Hampton City Schools, you should. Look at all the fun we're having!)

• Show Don't Tell: Students work together to create gestures or pictures and then guess what other groups have represented.
• Thinking Maps: (and other graphic organizers): Students can work together to create graphic organizers on chart paper. Tip: Give each student a different color marker so that you can see who did what work.
• Socratic Seminar: Students work together to facilitate higher-level discussions around pieces of text.

Allie West is a teacher with Hampton City Schools who is currently working on her PhD in Educational Leadership at Old Dominion University.

Managing Your Project-Based Learning: The Phases Approach

by Kate Wolfe Maxlow

One of the reasons that teachers often shy away from Project-Based Learning is the worry about time. When we do training sessions on PBL, that's the main question participants ask: How do we fit this in?

I like to think about it like this: when you workout, do you get the biggest bang for your buck when you work out for 20 minutes every other day, or 60 minutes once a week? It's pretty well accepted that it's the former. Spaced exercise tends to keep us in better shape than one long session.

It's the same way with PBLs. You don't need to shut down your entire classroom for a week or two in order to do a PBL. In fact, it's probably better if you don't, because then students can easily become overwhelmed and not have enough time to do the deep thinking and processing required to complete a bang-up project.

Instead, consider leading up to your PBL throughout an entire unit, or even throughout a quarter or the year, so that by the time you get to the actual implementation phase of the PBL, students are raring to go and can get it completed quickly.

Let me give you an example. One year, my fourth grade team decided to create a museum about the history and geography of our home state, Virginia, that would culminate in a giant museum fair the same day as our PTA event at the end of the first quarter.

Our study of Virginia geography and early history spanned the entire first quarter. At no point did we shut down the classroom. Instead, we peppered in smaller projects throughout lessons. When we learned about the geography,  students made salt dough maps. When we learned about the resources of the regions, they made raps and a few students took the initiative to ask our Instructional Resource Teacher to film them and help them turn their song into a music video. We wrote stories from the point of view of the American Indians before the arrival of the settlers, which students typed up, illustrated, and then made into books.

The actual preparation for the museum itself only took about 2 days. During social studies class, the students drew up a plan for who would bring which of their projects, how to display them, who would man the various stations, and what these docents would say. Everything else was already done by that point. It ended up being a huge success, because it had been implemented in chunks throughout the entire quarter.

Need more ideas?

Another project that we did ended in a reverse career fair. Once again, the build-up to it took almost an entire quarter. I started by having students think about a future career they would like. Then, as part of their English class, I had them research the median income for that career AND how much post-high school work would be required in order to achieve that career. Some people who wanted to be police officers switched to brain surgeons once they saw the salaries, then switched back once they realized they would be in school for a really, really long time to accomplish that.

We didn't stop there, though. Once students had their median income, over the course of various mathematics lessons, they built budgets based on their desired careers and potential monthly salaries. They had to factor in the type of house and car that they wanted, groceries, gas, entertainment money, etc.. Some of the students once again refined their career choice.

We kept going. In another lesson (this time in writing) they actually created a resume as if applying for a job in their chosen career. They had to brainstorm and list their educational background (after researching what technical schools or colleges they would need to attend based on their career choice), internships they would have, their skills and strengths. Then they wrote a cover letter.

For the actual PBL itself, the reverse career fair, students dressed as they would for their career. They printed copies of their resumes. Parents came and mingled around, acting as potential interviewers with the students. For instance, "I see you want to be a veterinarian. Where did you go to college? Why do you think you're qualified for this job?" Students distributed their resumes and gave answers based on their research.

Again, we didn't shut down our classroom for two weeks to do this PBL. It was woven in through an entire quarter in small pieces where it made sense with what we were already doing. That allowed me to keep up with my curriculum and pacing. It allowed the students not to get overwhelmed and to think about their choices and refine them as they went. I was able to provide feedback as they went and no one was scrambling at the end because they'd put everything off until the last minute.

Consider how you can phase in your PBL like this. You don't have to do it all at once. In fact, the sooner that you introduce it, the more you can make connections to it throughout the learning. For instance, I once watched a geometry teacher start a unit on geometric probability by saying, "At the end of the this unit, you're going to create a carnival game that uses geometric probability to make the game fun enough to play while ensuring you don't lose money because it's too easy to win." As he went through the mathematics instruction, he would be able to occasionally stop and say, "And you'll use this same process later in the unit on your project..."

You can even use your PBL as your hook in the beginning of the year. For instance, if you're eventually going to have your students write and perform a one-act play, you can tell them at the very beginning of the year. Let them know that you'll work together during the first quarter just to explore various genres of plays. Maybe during the second quarter, they'll work on their outline. During the third quarter, they'll work intensely on the writing of the one act, and during the fourth quarter, they'll work on practicing and planning for the actual event. You can have them work on their one-act whenever they finish their other work early, as well as scheduling maybe 10 minutes a few times a week to get with their group and discuss. By the time you get to fourth quarter, they're going to have a mostly-finished product and you won't have to completely shut down your classroom.

Hopefully, those give you some ideas for how to implement in a way that will actually work for you, your students, and your curriculum.

Kate Wolfe Maxlow is the Professional Learning Coordinator for Hampton City Schools in Hampton, Virginia. She can be reached at kmaxlow@hampton.k12.va.us.

Taking the Project-Based Learning Plunge: A Starter's FAQ Guide

by Kate Wolfe Maxlow

You've made up your mind. Yeah, your students have to do well on the end-of-year standardized assessment, but you know that's not enough. You want YOUR students to be critical thinkers, solving problems together. Making the world a better place. Believing that

they can make the world a better place.

So, you research some different instructional models and decide that you're going to dip your toes in the Project-Based Learning water. You love that it allows your students to implement what they're learning in a real-world situation, that it gives them choice and voice in their own learning. And bonus: it's basically how most people in the real-world work every day, so you're actually preparing them for life beyond PreK-12 education.

But you're a savvy educator and have a few questions before you start. Good for you. Let's talk about some of the most common ones.

1. Does the research even support Project-Based Learning as an effective instructional method?
First of all, if you haven't read this blog on the limitations of educational research, go do that real quick. You probably noticed one important thing: Educational research usually uses standardized tests (which are notoriously full of lower-level multiple choice, non-authentic items) to determine the effectiveness of a strategy.

I'm going to be honest here. If your main goal for the year is to get through a curriculum that's a mile wide and an inch deep and test it with out-of-context problems that really only get through, at best, the Application level...Project-Based Learning might not be the instructional method for you. Likewise, if you're at the beginning of a unit and you just need students to get some fact and skill fluency, direct instruction is probably your best bet. There's a time and a place for different instructional models.

John Hattie, author of Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement, doesn't look at the numbers specifically on project-based learning, but he does investigate the effects of its cousin, problem-based learning, and has this to say about it:

"Dochy, Segers, Van den Bossche, and Gijbels (2003) found an overall negative effective for problem-based learning compared to a conventional learning environment on knowledge (d = -0.78) but noted that problem-based learning had a positive effective on skills (d = 0.66). It was the case that students taught using problem-based learning had less knowledge but had better recall of the knowledge they had."

A d = 0.66 is equivalent to an average of a 25 percentile point gain for students who engage in the strategy. (Want to know more about effect sizes? Check out what Marzano has to say about them here.) Meanwhile, direct instruction, the most common instructional method, only has an effect size of d = 0.59 (a 22 percentile point gain for students engaging in the strategy).

Inquiry learning, also similar to project-based learning, has similar research backing it up. It's bad for memorizing a bunch of facts; great for critical thinking and having students actually remember what they learn.

So, where does this leave us? Don't waste precious instructional time doing a project-based learning unit on things that aren't really important for your students to remember. Use project-based learning on the skills that will have the most impact on students' future lives--the ones that you want them to remember forever.


2. How on earth will I have time to do a project-based learning unit?
Yep, these take a long time. They take even longer if it'll be the first time your students have collaborated together all year. That doesn't mean it's impossible, however.

First, choose a standard that you know can't be taught with direct instruction alone (for instance, creating a work of art or doing an experiment or better understanding the judicial system). If possible, pick a time when you know students don't tend to get much work done anyway, like right before Winter Break or after their standardized test; that way, you'll feel less pressure to force-feed them mounds of curriculum. Plus, most projects are inherently motivating for students, so they'll actually be more likely to actually work instead of just zoning out.

Next, keep your project small. Don't plan to have students write, direct, sew costumes for, and create backdrops for a play in which they turn all five acts of MacBeth into a rom com for your first project. You and your students will get bogged down in the details and there's the risk that none of you will ever want to try it again. Instead, have them update one scene from MacBeth into a modern form, such as a graphic novel, a plan for an app (Out, Out Spots!), or a music video. Make sure it's something that can be done in a week or less.

Now, determine what about your project you'll need to front-load. For instance, it's not a good idea to have students make videos during this project if you've never taught them how to make videos. They'll get bogged down in the mechanics and your project will drag on and on. If you know that's going to be an essential part of your project, get with your librarian or instructional technology teacher well before the actual project to teach students those kinds of skills.

Note that you might also have to teach students how to collaborate with one another. Don't assume they know how to do it. Direct instruction and multiple choice assessments have been such a mainstay in our education system for most kids' entire lives...when combined with the screen-obsessed culture that plagues most of our houses, most of our young people today need some explicit instruction on how to interact with others productively.

3. Will PBL actually motivate my students?
Maybe? Probably? You know, I'm not sure because I don't know what your project is. If you design a project around a driving question that's meaningful to them in a personal way, they're a lot more likely to find it motivating. For instance, a project around the driving question, "How can we package ice cream more efficiently?" will probably only motivate your true geometry and ice cream lovers, but a question like, "How can we increase the availability of nutritious and delicious foods in America's food deserts?" might grab them a lot more.

4. PBL doesn't seem like anything new. Haven't we done this before?

You're right! It's a really old concept. You can probably consider the design and building of the pyramids at Giza as a form of project-based learning. John Dewey, educational thinker from the early 20th century, was a huge proponent of project-based learning type methods, saying, "Education is not process for life; education is life itself."

What is new is trying to fit project-based learning into our current standards-heavy curriculum. When you have a ton of content that students need to memorize, it can be challenging to have them go deep into exploration of a specific theme or project. Not only that, but with the way that technology has changed in order to allow us to collaborate more effectively, the management of PBL has changed significantly as well. It's no longer just about teaching students how to work together effectively in-person; we have to teach them how to add comments to a Google doc, organize their materials online, etc..

Rarely is anything in education new; instead, think about it as refining and old process for the new world that we're living in.

In Summary

PBL is a solid instructional model that can help to engage students and effectively prepare them for real-life. It's time- and energy-intensive for everyone involved, and the smart educator will plan a PBL specifically for a unit that is most likely to engage students.

Check back soon for an article on how to chunk PBLs into manageable pieces.

Kate Wolfe Maxlow is the Professional Learning Coordinator for Hampton City Schools in Hampton, Virginia. She can be reached at kmaxlow@hampton.k12.va.us.