Collaboration & Relational Learning
Collaboration refers to students working together to accomplish a goal or a task. It can be taught. In fact, it should be taught. I have one concern and one caution before we start into this facet of student engagement.
My concern is with the term ‘relational learning’. Like so many other terms, it is a loaded term whose meaning is dependent on the user. What one teacher would call relational learning, another might call trivialized group work. For myself, collaboration and relational learning are taking place when the messiness of working with others has an opportunity to come to the forefront and be dealt with as it does in the ‘real’ world (Kohn, 1992). My caution is that a group of learners needs to be explicitly taught how to effectively work with others before they are asked to use team work to accomplish a task or take on a project. Lack of such instruction can lead to disaster, or at least enough difficulty that everyone, students and teacher, will give up on collaboration (Kohn, 1992). In our program, as part of the relationship development and team development, we spend a significant amount of time at the beginning of the year and throughout the year working on specific social and group work skills, like communication, to ensure the effectiveness of our collaboration model (Johnson & Johnson, 1999). This is discussed in more detail in the sections on Team Building and Adventure Based Learning. |
Learning Teams
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The entire structure of my teaching pedagogy and Let’s Lead – Nīkānētān is based on the principles of collaboration and relational learning. All of our students are broken up into four person learning teams. Every two months, these teams change so that by the end of the school year, the students have been in five different teams with different people from throughout the classroom. They are also assigned to seven person learning teams with completely different people. Teams with a heterogeneous make-up with learners with different learning styles performed better than homogeneous teams or teams that were formed with friends (Kayes, Kayes & Kolb, 2005). Most of the activities and projects that our students participate in take place within the context of these teams. Sometimes, the final products are team created and other times they are individually created, but students are always able to and encouraged to get whatever help they need from their team. The teams also provide an organizational structure very similar to that of a business that has departments or project teams which provides a real-life context, the importance of which is discussed later (Kayes, Kayes & Kolb, 2005).
It is our primary method for taking attendance, especially on out-of-classroom excursions. It is not strange to hear one of us call out "Learning Team Check" followed by the various learning teams calling out in order "Learning Team 1 here", "Learning team 2 missing _____", and so on. Even our students get to the point where when we gather back together, they call for a learning team check before we continue on because they know that we need to make sure that we have everybody. It is an effective risk and safety management structure and it works at all grade levels. The learning teams are responsible to and for each other. The students are expected to help, teach and work with each other. This is not to say that our students can’t work as individuals but they are always connected to a learning team of at least three other students. Students are more likely to be engaged and motivated when working with others (Fredricks et al., 2004; Johnson, 2008; Shernoff et al., 2003). We have found that students often learn better from their peers as they respect peer knowledge more than any other. In addition, as they are teaching each other, they are learning themselves and reinforcing current knowledge as they seek to explain what they know (National Research Council (U.S.), 2004). Our students have described how their learning teams help them every day. Brooks, Haley, McCann, Moore and Pearson (2000) found that students’ ability to listen, communicate, cooperate, organize, and problem solve improved as a result of consistent use of cooperative groups. Students enjoy working with others (Johnson, 2008, Lightner, Bober & Willi, 2007; National Research Council (U.S.), 2004). As a result of the learning teams, our students have had an opportunity to recognize and appreciate different perspectives and different approaches and strategies to problems (Lightner, Bober & Willi, 2007). Management Structure
Organization Structure
Collaboration Structure
Learning Structure
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