Collaboration is more than just group projects. Students collaborating with each other can create a safe space where they can share ideas, thoughts, experiences and feelings without feeling the need to hide who they are. Studies like the Jhonson, Jhonson, & Smith(1998) Show that collaborating not only helped students understand better, it helped students perform better academically overall.
How collaboration Helps
Collaborating between classmates and professors bring so many benefits to everyone participating. When collaborating students see just how different they are from one another. This helps student see other way to do things and get to know their classmates. Collaboration can also improve your ability to communicate. Talking to classmates can give you more confidence to be open about who you are and the ability to share with others. Collaborating is something that most people have to do their entire lives. In actuality, most if not every job requires employees to work as a team, because this makes work more efficient. If working as a team can be taught at a young age, this can help many students in their future career.
How to implement Collaboration
Many teachers use different methods. The most common one is group projects. A group of students get together and work towards one big goal, where everyone has to participate so it all comes together at the end. A more modern approach that is used more often is by implementing technology. Platforms such as Google Classroom, Microsoft teams and even blackboard, are used to bring students from different parts together. A discussion post where everyone can type responses to each other or a groupchat for every student to socialize are also good options.
Stephen, I found this post to be very detail oriented. You went about the Why's and How's in this post about collaboration, which is super informative to anyone who reads. I noticed that you didn't put any hyperlinks in this blog, so I am unsure what information you are referencing. I do think that keeping a hyperlink in the post is a great way to direct your audience to the source or information you drew from! Overall, the blog post kept me wanting to know more and I'd like to know your thoughts on other methods that can be used for collaboration!
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