Productive Group Work to Support Academic Skill Development

by Michele Cheyne

As a place of learning, Wye River Upper School strives to provide a challenging, yet supportive, environment for all students. Our goal is to take students from where they are and prepare them to meet the challenges for life beyond high school. Learning to work collaboratively on challenging academic content is one area of focus. This is important for all students, but particularly for our students who are neurodiverse. Learning to interact appropriately during collaborative learning, promoting activities that require multiple students to complete, and finding space for all students to have a voice is a critical skill for students as they move beyond high school. 

Developing the Skills for Effective Collaboration

Students come to learn the skills necessary to engage in just such collaborative work. However, there are challenges associated with enacting effective collaboration. To address these challenges students develop skills that allow them to be successful. The strategies for establishing a classroom culture of productive collaboration include the development and enactment of actionable norms - taking academic risks, working persistently, and communicating productively. These norms  help support students as they undertake challenging academic content while working with peers. 

Encouraging Academic Risk-Taking

Providing structured learning opportunities for students is one way to help develop the norms that will allow students to take academic risks which involves getting students to recognize the importance of being wrong or contributing ideas with which others may not agree. For example, student groups might put their ideas on how to explain a scientific phenomenon on a white board. These boards can be sequenced to tell the story of the explanation, building on the previous board. In this way, students’ ideas, right and wrong, can be talked through as a class. This helps students to recognize the value of incomplete or incorrect ideas as all ideas can be used to build the story. 

Building Persistence Through Collaborative Roles

Students are supported in their work with complex content fulfilling roles while they engage in collaborative work. These roles require students to bring certain strengths to their groups. One student might be good at constructing graphs or diagrams, another might be good at explaining an idea, and yet another might be good at finding an alternative solution. Working together, and pulling on these strengths, helps students to develop more robust understandings than simply listening to a lecture and taking notes. This structure helps students work through times when the content gets difficult and when working alone, may shut down or ask for help. Increased perseverance and persistence results from students working through struggles as a team. 

Developing Productive Academic Communication

Students also benefit from learning to communicate in productive ways that support discussions in the academic disciplines. Justifying a scientific argument, writing out a proof in geometry, or discussing the importance of a character in a piece of literature requires students to develop, and use, disciplinary language. When students work in groups their partners often ask for clarification and elaboration. This practice helps students to use disciplinary language with greater specificity, improving their ability to communicate in productive ways. 

The norms described here are just one way that students are supported while learning challenging academic content.