Unity is strength…when there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved.
When you hear the word “collaboration”, what first comes to mind? Working together? Being part of a team? Co-labor? Absolutely! But what do these descriptions really mean? What are the roles and responsibilities of each person in a collaborative group? According to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, collaboration includes the following attributes:
- Working effectively and respectfully with diverse teams
- Flexibility and willingness to be helpful in compromises to achieve a common goal
- Sharing responsibility for collaborative work and valuing individual contributions made by each team member (www.p21.org)
As educators, we can easily identify times we collaborate with our peers and coworkers. Team meetings, professional learning communities, school and district committees are just a few of the myriad of collaborative opportunities we encounter in our professional realm. When we participate in these settings, we discover that we perform the skills above without laborious thought. We simply… collaborate!
How did we learn these skills? How did we know the unstated rules for collaborating successfully with others? By practice and guidance, of course! Collaborative skills, while seemingly natural to us as adults, do not appear as easily in the behaviors of the students with whom we teach. Often, we have to model, model, and model again the basic elements of collaboration in order for our students to be successful with this process.
The collaborative process has exploded with the digital age. No longer are we forced to collaborate face-to-face to complete projects and tasks. Even phone calls and emails have been upgraded to include virtual conferencing and online social networking. For digital immigrants (that would be us), these modes of collaboration can be overwhelming and daunting at times. For digital natives (namely our students), it’s simply the way the world operates.
We hope this month’s blog will provide inspiration for new ways you can use collaboration in your profession and with your students. Together we can achieve great things!
ITRTS ~ Plugged In 