Team work: Collaborate with Others

Learning to collaborate with others is a very important skill to have in today's world, both for students and educators.
Teaching kids to be able to work and get along together will most definitely help them in the future when they experience
the "real world." Unlike individual learning, cooperative learning allows students to work together and capitalize on one
another's resources and skills while working as a group to accomplish a goal or task. Collaborating with others allows
students to demonstrate their ability to work effectively and respectfully within a diverse group, which is obviously an
important, if not necessary, skill to have today. Working within a group also shows a student's flexibility and willingness
to make compromises to share the responsibility and accomplish a common goal. Collaborating with others has been
shown to increase students' retention, improve their oral communication skills, enhance leadership qualities, and has
been shown to help develop their social skills. Technology obviously plays a huge role in group work. Students are now
able to work on and even share their work out of the classroom now with technology.

Application:

Being able to apply "collaborating with others" in the classroom is a very important skill to have, both for the students and
the teacher. Nearly every job in today's world involves being able to collaborate with others, which makes this skill SO
important. Using collaboration in the classroom would be somewhat easy. Group work is used all the time in classrooms
and has even been shown to improve students' retention while working and learning. As for specific examples, I think our
WebQuest we created for this class would be perfect to have students work on in groups. Our WebQuest involve d
researching different historical and national landmarks and providing information on them in a brochure. Students could
break down the WebQuest into different parts, and each have their own responsibilities for the whole project. They would
divide the work and assign each group member a different task amongst themselves. Not only would this help students
acquire the skill of being able to work with others, but would teach them responsibility as well, like most group projects.
They would learn responsibility because the rest of their group is relying on them to complete their part. Learning to
collaborate with others is a necessary skill to have in today's work and group projects (like our WebQuest) are a great way
to help students acquire/improve this 21st century skill.
Analysis:

One of the most important aspects of analysis in the classroom involves the relationships between different parts of a
process. This is required every time students and teachers collaborate with one another. As stated before, group projects
are usually divided into different sections, with each member being assigned his/her own section. Being able to
collaborate with others requires the students to analyze the material further and divide the work into dif ferent parts.
Each member of the group will work on his/her own section to accomplish a common goal. When the students' work
comes together, the group should understand how each section fits into the larger picture. Students wil l be able to see
how important each part of the process truly is, especially if one is missing. If a student can cooperate and work with
others, they will most likely know how to break up material into smaller pieces, allowing them to furth er understand each
part of the entire process.

Evaluation:

As stated previously in this website, an evaluation is the idea of judging how well someone performed a task. Students
are constantly being evaluated on their school work. As a teacher, to evaluate the collaboration of others, you must be
aware of what each group member was responsible for. Most of the time, the students should be evaluated on how well
they worked together, got along, and the work itself. However, in some cases, col laboration does not work out so well
with students. Either they simply do not agree on certain things, or a member of the group does not complete his/her
responsibilities towards the project. As a teacher, you must be fully aware when this happens. This is not always a bad
thing, because some students, especially at a young age, just clash. I have seen this several times throughout my fieldwork
for Educational Psychology. Many times, I have observed young students disagreeing on certain things on a proj ect or
simply not finishing their part of the assignment. It would not be fair to penalize the entire group, and the teacher I
observe has been very flexible in such instances. In cases like this, the group should definitely not be evaluated as a whole,
and you must look out for this as a teacher.