What are the skills that a student and citizen of the Information Age needs to have?
The Partnership for the 21st Century has conducted a survey to identify the key skills needed for success in the 21st Century. Every student in your school or district should be:
1. a critical thinker
2. a problem solver
3. an innovator
4. an effective collaborator
5. a self-directed learner
6. information and media literate
7. globally aware
8. civically engaged
Ken Kay, President of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, explains in his presentation at the FETC Conference about why these skills are important. This hour presentation includes 8 strategies that your school and district will want to integrate into the curriculum to best prepare your students for the quickly changing terrain, as well as why these skills are critical to our students.
I’m going to share this presentation with my colleagues. It will provide an introduction to discussing what are the skills necessary for success in the 21st Century. I would love to get a school-wide consensus about what skills our students need to have and how to best support them in acquiring these lifelong skills. If you haven’t seen Did you know?, you will want to watch this dynamic and thought-provoking presentation by Karl Fisch. It’s only about 6 minutes long. It’ll give you the inspiration and motivation to listen to the hour-long presentation, if you need a bit of a boost.
I’ve been investigating strategies to improve the quality of the cooperative learning group interactions in my math classroom. I figure that if I really want students to support each other, I need to teach communication skills and clearly state my expectations of the group.
This week I decided to have the groups focus on engaging all students in the activity. Here is what I did:
Clearly Stated the Focus Before they started working in groups, I let the students know that I wanted all students to participate and contribute to the group discussion. I also mentioned that at the end of the period, they would have to give me evidence of what was said or done that supported this focus.
Brainstormed Ideas
Prior to starting the activity, we spent about a minute or two as a class coming up with ideas about how to engage group members. For example,
We haven’t heard from you, Michael. What do you think?
Micaela, can you tell us what you got?
Self-Assessment
After completing the task, each group had an assessment sheet that they filled in together. Lots of websites, such as YouTube and Squidoo, have viewers rate things on a 5 star system. I decided to use a similar model. I had a few questions on the 1/4 sheet of paper. They filled in the number of stars that best represented their group’s behavior for the day.
Getting started
Staying focused
Including everyone
Overall performance
They also had to provide evidence of how they got everyone engaged by writing things that were said or done.
Wrap Up
As a class, I had a few groups report out about how well they managed to include others and if they needed any support.
Overall, I heard a lot more people actively soliciting answers and input from group members. There is definitely more work that needs to be done though. I may adapt the survey, but I like the general idea and structure of the assessment. Each week I’d like to have a different focus for the groups until the students naturally integrate these ideas into their interactions.
When students work in groups they often need support in how to help each other. So today we spent about 6 minutes reflecting on the cooperative learning roles and what the different people in the group might say or do.
Since the roles rotate each week, everyone will be all things at one point or another. As I like to think about it, “Everyone will be The Compassionate One at sometime.” This is a short activity to start building team rapport and support the students in their different cooperative learning roles.
Circular Silent Reflection 1. Each student wrote his or her role on the top of a scratch piece of paper.
2. Students had about a minute to write what are things that a person in that role would say or do in the group. I suggested that they may want to write quotes. For example, The Organizer could be heard saying, “I’ll go get the materials.”
3. After a minute, I asked students to pass the papers clockwise and read what was written.
4. Each student had about a minute to add additional comments.
5. Then I told them to pass the papers again and read what was written and add comments. This was repeated until the person received his original paper.
6. After that, the rotation cycle was about 30 seconds to read the last comments on each paper. So the papers cycle through to each person again.
I wanted to provide more support to the groups and their members because I know that kids have great intentions but sometimes lack the ways to appropriately express their thoughts. This activity is a quick way to give them additional ways of positively engaging with their table mates.
Watch this YouTube video to learn Think-Pair-Share learn hand signals to make this activities even more fun and easy to manage. Read my post on Think-Pair-Share-Write activities for more information on creating and using them in your classroom.
Our students are the Millennials, and they are a generation that value collaboration. Cooperative learning has been around for a while, yet few teachers have actually had it modeled for them or know the components of what make cooperative learning groups successful.
Most teachers mistakenly believe, as did I, that when kids work in groups this is cooperative learning. However, many of us wonder where the cooperative part is happening because kids may be sitting together but one person does everything. Cooperation is the essence of working in teams. This needs to be modeled and supported.
Do you know the five elements of cooperative learning? If not, chances are your group work may be hit or miss in its effectiveness. Here are some things to consider when using cooperative learning:
Positive Classroom Environment
It’s important to build a safe classroom environment. This can be done by:
setting classroom norms
doing class building activities (See “Tribes” for ideas)
explicitly teaching cooperative skills, such as how to disagree politely, and focusing on that skill for a few class periods
requiring the students to check in with each other before asking the teacher for help; all students in the group should know the question that is being asked. When you go to a group, if Maria is raising her hand, ask Josh, “What’s Maria’s question?”
Group Students Heterogeneously
Students learn cooperative skills better when they have to work with a wide range of people. There are times when homogeneous grouping is appropriate, but this tends to be the exception.
Positive Interdependence
Activities need to be structured so that what helps one group member helps everyone. The activities have to be structured to promote collaboration. Some activities that naturally do this are jigsaws and think-pair-share (See links above).
Individual Accountability
Every student has a role and is accountable for work. This can be accomplished by students labeling what part of the group project they contributed to or by having an individual assessment on the information after the group work.
Don’t give up!
Keep experimenting and reflecting on the activities you did with your students. What worked? What didn’t? Why? Starting to use cooperative learning strategies can be a bit unnerving at first because we give up the authoritarian teacher role, but the rewards are immense. Our kids deserve it, and we’re modeling perseverance too!
For more ideas, strategies and resources on cooperative learning check out my Educating Millennials website.
Resources You Can Use
I also highly recommend Teacher’s Resource for Cooperative Learning: Practical Techniques, Basic Principles and Frequently Asked Questions by my former professor Dr. George Jacobs. It really helped me to identify what I needed to do to have more effective cooperative learning activities. Click on the book cover to purchase this helpful resource.
If you find the information on this blog helpful and are interested in any of the resources I’ve highlighted here, I’d be grateful if you purchased them through the links on my blog as I earn a small a percentage from each sale. Thanks.
Kids of today are used to working collaboratively. It’s a characteristic of the Millennial Generation. Yet how effective is your group work in class? Is it hit or miss? If so, here are some great ideas to get you and your kids back in the spirit of cooperation.
I was struggling with my students’ group work because they are grouped in tables, yet when they do homework some of the traditional roles that help define a group, such as reporter and recorder, didn’t make sense. They weren’t going to report out. They were doing their homework and everyone had to write so there wasn’t a need for a recorder. This week I came up with some new roles that reflect the new era and the new direction in the classroom. They are:
The Task Master
Makes sure that all people know the assignment.
Makes sure that all group members are working on the same problem.
What did everyone get for #4? – Ok. Now let’s go to #5.
Can someone explain to the group how to do problem #3?
The Understanding One
Makes sure that everyone is doing what s/he is supposed to be doing.
Makes sure that everyone is talking only with his/her group members.
Makes sure that everyone understands the problem.
When no one in the group understands, this is the person who communicates with the teacher.
Does everyone know how to do the problem?
The Organizer
Makes sure that the group has the necessary supplies to do the task.
Makes sure that all people take out the materials they need: toolkits, paper, etc.
Makes sure the desk and area around the table are neat at the end of the period and that materials are returned.
Does everyone have the materials they need? (If not, help the group members get what they need.)
Can you please check under your desk to make sure there is no trash?
The Compassionate One
Makes sure that everyone feels included in the discussion.
Acknowledges group members for what they did that made the group the work better.
We haven’t heard from you in a while, Jake. What do you think?
Thanks, Nick, for explaining how to solve the problem to the group.
Monday I introduced the new roles. They are already grouped in tables of 4 and by each seat is a colored star. I have an overhead transparency that I use that has the four colored stars on it. I explained before I showed them the roles, that we would rotate each week. It was absolutely precious to see the middle school students say, “I’m the Compassionate One” or “I get to be the Understanding One this week.”
A few minutes into the homework, I would check in with the class to see if the entire group was on the same problem. If so, I would either say “Give yourself a pat on the back”, “Give a high 5 to your group members” or “Thank your Task Master for doing such a great job.”
When the homework was on a different sheet then the classwork, I wrote on the board and told the class, that The Organizer would have to bring up all group members’ papers before I would give them the homework handout. This ensured that groups had more reason to help each other.
Overall this week, the groups worked much better together. There was much more inclusion of other people’s ideas and team members worked together to support each other. I also heard a lot of nice comments said to teammates, which made teaching even more pleasurable.
