blog post #2

Both books talk about Collaborative learning. What are some of the challenges you see in implementing this in your classrooms?

The biggest challenge I see in implementing collaborative learning in the classroom is the initial time that it takes to prepare. It takes time to reinvent your curriculum to meet the requirements of collaboration. It is just easier to do it like it has always been done. I think that the key is to create collaborative lessons in a slow progression, one or two a year and build on them each year.

Collaborative learning also takes time to train the students how to work in a group setting, modeling your expectations so that they know what a well functioning group looks like. This is something that I have witnessed in many classrooms, students are grouped to work on an assignment but they are not really told what the expectations are for the group. In this situation you will usually have one person that takes control, one that argues with everything the leader says, one or two that look totally frustrated by the bickering and one that just sits back and takes a free ride.

I found an excellent article on the ISTE web site about reinventing your classroom. It has stories from teachers that have made the move to project based learning. http://www.iste.org/images/excerpts/REINVT-excerpt.pdf

I also found a web site that has tutorial videos about implementing project based learning into your curriculum. There is a ton of information on this site that I found useful. http://www.bie.org/

Here is one of the videos from the site that I found interesting.


video from The Buck Institute for Education, problem based learning page http://www.bie.org/