Skilled Communication and Collaboration

I have really enjoyed diving into the skilled communication and collaboration competencies this week. In my opinion, these are two of the most practical and important competency areas as they are extremely applicable in real-world applications. In terms of skilled communication I think it is easier to implement portions of the elevator and that the activities tend to come more naturally. I was surprised that the first level of the elevator required multi-modal communication. Before this lesson I would have assumed that skilled communication would focus first on communicating to a specific audience. While this is a crucial part to advancing up the ladder the multi-modal requirement precedes it. Teaching students to speak to a specific audience seems very natural to me, especially in writing activities. Conversely, collaboration and teaching students how to successfully collaborate seems like a mountain of a task to me! When reviewing the content for this week my thought process was "Collaboration. Working in pairs. Oh no." I feel slightly better after completing the sorting activity this week and I think I have a good understanding of the distinguishing characteristics of the elevator levels. Group work is only the beginning of collaborating and in order to be truly collaborative the work needs to be purposeful. The key defining difference that stuck out for me about collaboration was that the work needs to require a partner or partners; the task would be impossible without the multiple students. I also liked the idea that in successful collaborative work that students make decisions as a team about all aspects of the work: content, process, and product.

In my own classroom I would really like to focus on implementing higher levels of collaboration. Collaborating with peers is a crucial skill that plays an integral part even in our adult lives that if worked on as a young student everyone benefits. I feel as though creating activities that allow opportunities to collaborate isn't impossible but does require a good amount of thought and effort on the teacher's part however that doesn't scare me. The most challenging part of collaborating is going to be teaching students how to effectively work with one another, especially at certain grade levels. Developmentally, this is asking students to step outside of their comfort zone and really consider the thoughts and feelings of others as credible. I have a few projects in mind that I am going to look at elevating the levels of collaboration students could participate in.