Collaborative Learning

students work together in small groups, sharing skills, knowledge, and perspectives to reach a common goal.

Collaborative learning

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Tips for Success

What Is It?

Templates

Strategies that support

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Sketch & Tell

Card Sort

ABC Graffiti

ABC Brainstorm/Graffiti

A group brainstorming strategy designed to promote thinking for a topic, concept, text, etc. Students engage to activate prior knowledge and make connections to new learning.

• Organize students into small groups and provide the class with a topic.
• Assign each group a different color that corresponds to a slide.
• Groups write down words/phrases for as many letters on their slide as they can in the time provided using their prior knowledge of the topic.
• Call time. Groups rotate to the next slide. They pick up where the last group left off in trying to fill out the slide.
• Call time. Groups rotate again. This time, have them use an outside resource to generate new words/phrases for the remaining letters. Students can also add to letters that were previously used.
• Call time. Groups rotate to their original slide to construct a summary statement that synthesizes the slide's information.Groups share out their summary statements with the class.

Strategies that Support

Several strategies effectively support Collaborative Learning, including Sketch & Tell, ABC Graffiti/Brainstorm, and Card Sort. Each encourages individual contributions toward a shared goal, fostering peer-to-peer learning and promoting a deeper, more dynamic understanding of the subject.

Tips for Success

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Card Sort

Sketch & Tell

Remind students that the focus is on the concepts not the artwork.No screenshots or images, encourage students to draw to invoke creativity - try using Autodraw.com End with presentation or gallery walk.

Be prepared to discuss misconceptionsUse a visual timer to encourage students to not overthink the process Remind students how they are expected to react when they disagree with a peer

ABC Graffiti

Have students work together at the beginning of a lesson to make connections, and then challenge students to create new connections individually at the end of the lesson.

Hexagonal Thinking

Hexagonal Thinking is a strategy that challenge students to create and explain connections between vocabulary, ideas, and concepts.

Click Here to Read More About Hexagonal Thinking

Photo from Betsy Potash, Cult of Peagogy: https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/hexagonal-thinking/

Digital Templates

Sketch & Tell, ABC Graffiti and Card Sort work great digitally! Consider using Google Slides, Auto Draw & Pear Deck to create the cards and assign them through Google Classroom for students to complete digitally.

Sketch & Tell

ABC Graffiti

Card Sort

Collaborative Learning

Collaborative Learning is an educational approach where students work together in small groups, sharing skills, knowledge, and perspectives to achieve a common goal. This method fosters active participation, open communication, and shared responsibility, helping students build critical thinking, teamwork, and social skills while deepening their understanding of content.

Click Here to Read How Collaboration promotes Deeper Learning

Sketch & Tell Eduprotocol

Students develop understanding and summarizing skills as they read, sketch, and explain to a peer!

• Students are given a prompt (topic/concept/question).
• Students access the template via Google Slides.
• On one side of the slide, students sketch in response to the prompt usingdrawing tools or Autodraw.
• You can create your sketch in several ways:

• Next students partner up and tell each other about their sketches.
• Then students use the other side of their slide to write a few sentencesabout their sketch.
• End with a gallery walk or quick presentation of all the slides to make sure students are seeing all the options.

Click here to see how you can take Sketch & Tell further scaffold with Depth of Knowledge

Card Sort

Students organize their prior knowledge about a concept or topic through sorting lesson-focused cards into categories. As students work together to sort the cards, they justify their own ideas, consider others' ideas, and modify their thinking as new information is presented.

• Begin by preparing a set of cards that align with the content goal of the lesson. Create the cards you want participants to sort. You can put text or pictures on the cards.
• Have students divide into groups or pairs.
• Provide students with category headers under which to sort their cards. Encourage them to lay out each card in a row or column under the category headers so it is easy to see how they sorted each item.
• Student groups must come to a common agreement on which category to place each card under before sorting a new one.
• Have groups share out where they sorted each card and why.