Teaching Collaboration: A 21st Century Skill

Do you teach collaboration skills? This is a great resource to use before students engage in a collaborative project or activity! The activities in this resource can be used in any content area across the curriculum to teach collaboration skills. During the first month of back to school or before students engage in collaborative learning, use the activities in this resource as a springboard to help students understand your expectations during cooperative learning assignments. The activities can be scaffolded for 3rd and 4th graders and are appropriate as is for 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th graders. The activities are differentiated and provide opportunity for student choice. This packet includes 7 primary assignments to include 12 differentiated learning activities or choices. With most assignments students will choose to complete Choice A or Choice B.

Some of the activities are as follows: act out a collaborative learning skit or scenario, evaluate using a collaborative learning rubric whether or not the characters in the skit collaborated effectively, sort puzzle pieces and assemble a jigsaw puzzle with effective collaboration pieces, analyze what effective collaboration looks and sounds like, and provide feedback for more effective collaboration in a metacognitive reflection activity.

Because the resource includes student choice activities, it can be used to differentiate instruction and promote student directed learning. Furthermore, the activities in this packet can be used during whole group instruction, individually, or in small group literacy centers. With this in mind, I have included black and white printables at the end of the packet. The printables, student work, and brainstorming post-it notes make a great bulletin board. The activities in this resource are Common Core Standards aligned and require students to use higher level thinking skills.

Also, this would make a great professional development lesson as it is a lesson designed to promote 21 century skills.

Teaching Collaboration Skills: A 21st Century Skill is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.