Blend small group collaboration
Small group projects are a staple of many classrooms. And yes, if you're like many teachers, you struggle to determine the best way to facilitate these experiences for your students. Modifying traditional in-person, small group experiences to a blended model can solve some challenges. If we follow the guidelines for true collaboration set out in the Microsoft Educator Center 21st Century Learning Design course, we need to ensure that students have shared responsibility, make substantive decisions together, and that their end product is interdependent.
Practice collaborative skills with the 21CLD collaboration dimension
By creating small group teams or channels within a team for students to use for small group collaboration, teachers set the stage for successful communication and collaboration. Teachers can scaffold students through the process of identifying primary responsibilities or roles during their projects. Using posts in Teams to define roles keeps a record and ensures everyone is on the same page. By using Teams for small group collaboration projects, student-teacher communication is also managed in one place and loss of information/misunderstandings are minimized.
Identifying roles and a central collaborative space means students are more likely to engage in substantive decision making together. No one is left out or left behind when they can catch up on all conversations within posts and watch meeting recordings at their own pace. Substantive decision making in groups can be difficult as leaders and accepters tend to fall into their traditional roles, but if you have set out roles and expectations in advance, each student has a higher likelihood of contributing with their strengths as well as pushing themselves out of previous comfort zones. Providing opportunities for students to collaborate across Microsoft 365 and other EDU partner apps enables students to create content highlighting their current skills, be that verbal expression (Word), graphic design (PowerPoint), or research (OneNote or Wakelet). Students can hone their current skill set, and work together to support each other in developing new skills and easily shared documents and collections.
Finally, true collaboration requires interdependent final products that reflect student voice, creativity, and strong communication. Interdependency in product means that you can't take part of it away and still have a complete product; if you lose one piece, the product is no longer intelligible or operable. There are many times small group projects can be broken into discrete independent projects, but then the collaborative aspect may become an afterthought. Interdependence can be difficult to achieve. Interdependence is easier to accomplish when you're working closely with your teammates, both synchronously and asynchronously, so that project segments mesh together constantly and build on one another, creating a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Using technology to support this synchronous/asynchronous creativity enables a greater degree of interdependence in the final product.