Cycle 2: TLC Collaboration

We began the session with a team task involving Country Dingbats. As this session is largely to do with effective collaboration I assigned the following roles to each member of the triad.

• Creative thinker (They were the only person allowed to see the dingbats)
• Writer (Their task was to fill in the answer sheet)
• Communicator (Their role was the go between and the coordinator of the teams' strategy) 

The communicator had to sit in between the creative thinker and the writer and each member of the triad had to try each role. 

We followed the task with a discussion on the importance of assigning roles for all group tasks so that every member was accountable. 

Following of from this task each TLC member was given the following sheet and using the Kagan structure Think Pair Share were set the following task:

Think - Reflect on your use of collaboration in the classroom so far. (www and ebi)

Pair -Compare and discuss what was effective and what wasn't this with your partner.

Share - Join with another team and share all of your ideas.

This structured worksheet had been a resource made by a member of the first learning cycle and worked well for this task and could easily be used across the curriculum. We felt that adding structure to a TPS task would help students gain more from the activity because they had to actively listen to others to be able to complete the task.

To continue with the theme of making collaboration effective we discussed the concept of social loafing. Social loafing has been identified by psychologists as “the phenomenon of people deliberately exerting less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group than when they work alone.”

The triads were asked to produce a success criteria to help overcome this problem.

We then pulled all our ideas together to create the following slide. Before TLC three we have decided to trial the success criteria in the classroom and evaluate its effectiveness.