Setting up Collaborative Teams

 

Before:


Create teams of 3-5 students that will remain in place either all year or each semester.


Be cognisant of personalities, academic strengths and weaknesses, and behavioral needs.


Decide what you want your teams to accomplish. Are you focused on effort, process, or product? How do you want your teams to function? Will teammates be assigned specific roles, or will they choose for themselves?


Day 1 (10-20 minutes)


Talk about what it means to be a team member versus a leader. Why do we work in teams? What are some examples of teams you know? Make an anchor chart to guide the discussion.


Introduce or review the roles you want your teams to utilize. Add to the anchor chart.


Day 2 (10-20 minutes)


Review anchor chart and previous learning.


Place students into their pre-created groups. Allow them to choose a place to work in the classroom.


The challenge: Work together to create a team name. Write it on a paper along with their names.


Whole Class Debrief. Students share their name: Random reporter (number team members 1-4, roll dice and that person reports). Also, point out what you saw and heard as teams were working. Ask students what made your team work well/not well? What can your team do next time?


Day 3 (10-20 minutes)


Review anchor chart and previous challenge.


Teach/practice active listening. Active listening skills are essential in good group work. When students are listening well, their eyes are on the speaker and their mouths are closed. Active listeners avoid interrupting but may sometimes summarize what they hear and ask for clarification when needed. (demonstrate by having students practice with partner). Active listening shows respect for the speaker and allow the listener to learn as much as possible from that speaker's words. Ask how they will manage who is speaking and when to change speakers?


The challenge: create speaking norms.


Whole Class Debrief. Students share their system: Random reporter (number team members 1-4, roll dice and that person reports).


Day 4-6 (10-20 minutes each day)


Review anchor chart and previous learning.


Teach/practice explaining ideas and opinions. Team members need this skill to communicate in cooperative interactions. Explaining must go beyond single-word answers; students have to use complete sentences and explain their thinking. They must explain their ideas to others so that peers can understand them too. This demands metacognition, evidentiary thinking, summarizing, paraphrasing, and listening to others thoughtfully. Have students practice with a partner to summarize what they heard you just say during instruction.


In conjunction, students need to encourage teammates. This is a great place to bring in appropriate discourse sentence stems such as “I agree”, “I disagree because”, or “I was thinking…” This helps all members of the team feel valuable and heard. Have students practice using respectful words and tones.


The challenge: do some fairly simple STEM type challenges so students can practice working together. Students can also do team building activities (human knot, etc).


Day 7 (10-20 minutes)


Review anchor chart and previous learning.


The challenge: Create a poster that represents your team.


Whole class debrief.


Your teams are ready to accept an academic challenge. In addition, teams will build mutual respect and trust, making it easier for quieter students to take risks and participate more fully. Every few weeks, challenge the teams with a team building activity to continue to nurture their functionality and respect.

Less Talk and Collaborative Teams Saved My Math Lessons

This year my school district adopted Eureka Math. Along with the adoption is the familiar expectation of fidelity to the program. In my experience, I have found that this typically means use the program exactly as it is scripted and do not deviate.

Eureka is organized into four parts: a fluency component (building automaticity), an application problem (opportunity for inquiry based learning and deep questioning), concept development (teacher based direct instruction), and the student debrief. It became apparent very quickly that this program does not work “as is” and requires the touch of a competent teacher to make it shine. However, there is a clear district expectation to adhere to the program and to “just keep going” even when students are not gaining mastery of the skills. As you might expect, my entire body and soul were screaming out in frustration at being so restricted and limited. I felt as though my hands were tied behind my back as I was forced to watch some of my students fall farther and farther behind.



So instead of accepting defeat and failure, I searched for ways to stay true to the program while making sure my students were learning and mastering the strategies and skills. In reality, I was looking for loopholes.

The first problem seemed to be the amount of noise I created by talking, talking, and talking. Therefore, I first had to make sure my students were having meaningful opportunities to respond through gestures, oral responses, or writing (Cuticelli, Collier-Meek, & Coyne, 2016).

Next, I revisited the Kagan Structures website for ideas and then looked for ways to pare down my instruction during concept development and provide more opportunities to respond. Since the concept development section usually consists of the teacher talking at the student for 20-30 minutes followed by releasing them to independently tackle the problem set, I knew this was where I needed to change things up.



Building on what Eureka presented, I used the gradual release of responsibility approach (I do, We do, You Do). I stood at the Smartboard (I did away with each student having a whiteboard during this part because it was becoming a distraction for my struggling students) and spent about 3-4 minutes where I did a problem alone through a think aloud/model. Then I used a similar problem and we did one together for 3-4 minutes (I am still the only one writing at the Smartboard) while I questioned what we were doing and why. Next in 3-4 minutes, I showed another similar problem and this time, I drew or wrote what the class told me to do, prompting them with questions when needed.

Yes it is fast. However, I talk a lot less and my students talk a great deal more. This is where the collaborative structures from Kagan grew in importance. During the I Do part, students watch and hopefully, absorb. But during the We Do and You Do sections, I find that time-wise, it’s easiest and most effective to use Think, Pair, Share or RallyCoach while solving these problems and explain their thinking with each other. This opportunity to respond individually but safely means that students are explaining what they are doing and why they are doing it before they attempt it on their own ( www.kaganonline.com ). This led to the next big breakthrough.

Collaborative teams. No, not just assigning students to go work with each other, but actual, teams. (at the bottom of this article you can download a sample plan to set up your teams)



I had heard and read about teams and creating them but I admit, I had not utilized them. So I read Making Cooperative Learning Powerful (Slavin, 2014) and painstakingly created four teams that will remain together for the entire year. For the first week, teams worked on team building activities, including creating a team name and designing a poster to represent themselves. These teams have been one of the most powerful changes I have made to my instruction this year.

Once we have done the I Do, We Do, You Do in roughly 10-12 minutes, students are released into their teams to complete the problem set. My students actually cheer as soon as I say they will work with their teams. It’s beautiful!

The challenge (I call them challenges instead of work or assignments) is to work together and complete the assigned problems. They sit where they want and do the problems in whatever order they want. No team can show it to me until every student has theirs complete. All students are trained to help their teammates by verbally explaining that steps they took to solve their problem. It is astounding to me to hear 6-7 years olds having conversations like this:

Student 1: “This is a subtraction problem so we have to start with the whole and take away parts. I drew twelve circles because the total was twelve. It also says that Jane had twelve apples. You draw twelve circles to represent the apples.”

Student 2: “Like this? Now what?”

Student 1: “It says that Jane gave four of her apples away. How can you show that?”

Student 2: “Oh, I need to cross them out! That means she had eight apples left. I did it!”

Yes, that really happened. And it happens every day. And, yes, my students are 6 and 7 years old. And now, when they turn in their problem set and do their independent exit ticket, they are showing mastery of the strategies and skills.

The best part? While students are working in teams, it leaves me free to move through the room, checking in with each group, working one on one with struggling students, and righting misconceptions. It also means that every student is getting the concepts and no one is being left behind. And most exciting, my students LOVE working together. Most days they do extra problems… for fun!

What I learned from this experience? No matter what program and no matter what restrictions are put in place by administration or consultants, there is a way to make sure every child learns if we look at the problem as one that can be solved.

Now I talk less and allow my students work in collaborative teams. It saved my math lessons and the math life of my students.

References

Cuticelli, M., Collier-Meek, M., & Coyne, M. (2016). Increasing the quality of tier 1 reading instruction: Using performance feedback to increase opportunities to respond during implementation of a core reading program. Psychology in the Schools, 53(1), 89-105.

“Kagan Structures: A Miracle of Active Engagement.” Kagan Publishing & Professional Development – KaganOnline.com, https://www.kaganonline.com/.

Slavin, R. E. (2014). Making Cooperative Learning Powerful. Educational Leadership,72(2), 22-26. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/oct14/vol72/num0…

Below is a document of daily activities to help set up teams in your classroom: