Collaboration

 I am becoming more and more convinced that collaboration is the key not only to learning, but to the professional future of our students.  Guy Kawasaki  provides a great post about an article in Psychology Today by Carlin Flora called "Dream Teams," which is a study of collaboration in architecture, music, fashion, robotics. I spend a lot of time teaching collaboration to my students using Web 2.0 tools. 

For example, students in our school have collaborated on a wiki about the Inauguration.  Last year our 4th students, collaborated on a wiki about New York State.  That same group of students scored very well on this year's State Social Studies Assessment. 

I've learned a few techniques regarding wikis in the classroom. The most important is to establish a rule that students not add personal identification to wiki posts.  The emphasis is on the group's product, not the individual's product.  Students still gain satisfaction from recognizing their individual contributions on a wiki, and it's always possible to identify the editors through the history. That, of course, prevents bad behavior in the project.  The wiki method offers the ability for student's to learn individual responsibility and group learning.

Students get excited about a wiki.  One student, who often appears bored in my classes, got very excited after taking the state test.  She informed me that the DBQ portion of the exam had focused on Peter Stuyvesant, and she had written an entire piece on him for our wiki project.