Achieving Successful Student Collaboration

In the educational realm, collaboration is necessary in order to help with student success. Perhaps the most important type of collaboration, is student collaboration. I fully believe that students often times learn best from one another, as opposed to listening to a teacher lecture. As a teacher, it is one’s responsibility to teach students the required content in a way that appeals to their unique learning ability. It is also the teacher’s responsibility to guide the students in such a way that they can successfully explore concepts with one another, in other words collaborate with one another. During my time observing a first grade classroom at Model Laboratory School, I was able to witness successful student collaboration facilitated by the teacher. In the classroom in which I was …show more content…
Like the teacher I observed, I feel that learning centers will be an excellent way to accomplish successful student collaboration. When this activity becomes a part of my instructional day, I will look back on this observation and utilize the organizational strategies that this teacher used. The collaborative activity proceeded smoothly because the students were independent and knew when and where to transition with little loss of learning time. When the time comes, I will also put my own twist on learning centers. Once the new semester begins after Christmas break, I would like to change the center groups based on how students have progressed over the first semester, as opposed to keeping students in the same groups all year long. By switching up the groups, students will be able to learn and to help one another in gaining new perspectives and to continue to develop interpersonal skills by working with a variety of personalities. This will not only still be promoting collaboration, but will also teach students that there is often more than one viewpoint or more than one way to solve a