PBL + Collaboration
An #alted non-negotiable
One of the core tenets of PBL is group work or collaborative work. It is one of the 4 or 6 C’s, whatever your school uses :)
If you ever worked at a comprehensive school and moved to an alternative school, you will find that students in an alternative school automatically work together on their own. As you can imagine, students who have not been successful in class are not the first to take the lead and initiate conversations with a group of strangers (their peers). Here is how you make it work.
At every opportunity possible, have students make connections with other students. When it comes to relationships, peer relationships rank really high, even as close to the research on one-caring-adult. This means more restorative circles, more getting-to-know-you, more think-pair-shares, more elbow partners, and more students talking with each other.
Always assign group roles. This will be different for every subject area and the purpose of students being in a group. Please do not expect students to know how to work in a group. This is a learned skill. Here is a video (a private school video) that models how this looks. It is a great example of what to teach and group roles. It also has small class sizes, which we often see in alternative ed, and we know that we need different teaching strategies.
Assign groups. A practice that strengthens hope (goals, pathways, agency) is having high-hope students work with low-hope students. Hope is contagious. When we strategically group students, they tend to do better in their collaboration tasks.
Discussion starters and sentence starters. This is especially important for our emerging multilingual learners and our neurodiverse populations, but it is something that can benefit all types of learners. Sentence starters not only provide an example they also provide a starting place. You can find subject matter sentence starters all over the internet. I have included some of my favorite lists. Kate Kinsella has a ton of very good talking stems. But there are loads you can look at and make your own.
Start with a JigSaw activity. This low-prep activity has students read a certain part of a text, create a summary, be an expert in that part of the text, and then share their knowledge. Here is an article that describes the “how to” of a jigsaw activity. The article is linked in the picture.
Use socratic seminars or similar structures (but make it highly structured). Here is my adapted Socratic Seminar structure. I have linked a copy of everything you need for a Socratic Seminar. Just make a copy; it is view only. All you need to do is teach expectations and the learning of what you will be discussing.
Teaching students how to work in collaborative groups takes time. If your school makes this a priority and students do this in every class, you accelerate this learning.
Collaboration is a fantastic skill for all students to use for the rest of their lives.
Thanks for being a #alted champion!
-jamie