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Meaningful Collaboration

Guiding Question: What does meaningful collaboration look like and how does it support

multilingual student learning?

After this module, I will be able to:

• Discuss the benefits of meaningful collaboration for multilingual students’ language and

content development opportunities.

Implement meaningful collaboration opportunities in my classroom among and between

students as well as with me and other adults.

Explore

In this module, we will be exploring the concept of meaningful collaboration, what it

looks like and how it supports multilingual learners. We will also be asking you to consider

yourself as a teacher in the role of collaborator with your students as well as discuss the

implications and planning required to be able to position yourself in such a role. Building on the

theories and ideas from this module, you will have the tools and resources to begin to integrate

meaningful collaboration into your pedagogy across any content area you teach. However,

meaningful collaboration is a large and expansive topic that warrants attention and investigation

beyond the scope of this module. Yet with the ideas, tools and resources in this module, you

should get well on your way to creating meaningful collaborative spaces for your multilingual

classrooms.

Joint Productive Activity as the Foundation for Meaningful Collaboration

In the 1990s, there was a research center at the University of California Berkeley called

the Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence (CREDE). The research that

began at CREDE and has continued has had a deep impact on the field of teaching multilingual

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students. In fact, the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) had its beginnings at

CREDE and is a tool/professional development program that many across the U.S. are familiar

with and have found benefit from using. The research coming out of this center has strong

evidence for its value with multilingual students, but also with other groups of students, making

it particularly useful for consideration in general education classroom contexts.

Another set of resources developed from this center that have both strong theoretical and

empirical foundations are the Standards for Effective Pedagogy1. While the CREDE Standards

are not the kind of standards delineate what will be taught across grade levels like the Common

Core State Standards or the Next Generation Science Standards, they do represent enduring

principals of learning that are useful guides to developing a strong pedagogy to support

multilingual students across all content areas. The research on these standards is significant2 and

is growing3, even internationally4, and suggests the value of these standards put into practice.

Further, the CREDE Standards are theoretically extremely strong. They are essentially

sociocultural theory (think Vygotsky) operationalized into a pedagogy. Research over the last

decade has moved the CREDE Standards even further to become critical sociocultural pedagogy

operationalized5 (think Freire and Vygotsky), which means researchers have infused attention to

critical pedagogy into these sociocultural practices. Overall, we highly recommend these

standards and have integrated the ideas and principals from them across the modules in this text

as well, as recommend CREDE Standards related resources for further learning opportunities.

1
Tharp, Estrada, Dalton, & Yamauchi (2000)
2
e.g., Hilberg, Tharp, & DeGeest (2000), Doherty & Hilberg (2007)
3
e.g. Teemant & Hausman (2013)
4
e.g., Viesca et al., (2019)
5
E.g., Teemant Leland & Berghoff (2014)

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The first standard in the CREDE Standards is called “Joint Productive Activity” and is

described as when “teachers and students produce together.” The notion of joint productive

activity is quite powerful in helping teachers ensure that they are designing instructional

activities that require collaboration. By focusing on the idea of joint productive activity, teachers

and students can co-construct both tangible and intangible products. An example of a tangible

product is a collaboratively designed poster, story or skit. Students and teachers can also jointly

produce intangibles like ideas, understandings and solutions. It does not matter if the product that

is produced is tangible or intangible. The relevance of the product will depend on the lesson and

learning goals for the specific activity. Focusing on joint productive activity ensures that strong

collaboration occurs between and among students as well as with the teacher and/or other adults

in the classroom to create that product.

We’ve had the opportunity to work with and visit teachers’ classrooms across the United

States and in several countries in Europe. In each of those visits, we have seen incredible

instances of joint productive activity. Classroom snapshot #1 is from a visit to a school in

Finland that has a relationship with the local teacher education program (meaning many pre-

service teachers are trained at this school).

CLASSROOM SNAPSHOT

In a second grade classroom in Finland, we observed the whole class collaborating with

the teacher on an intangible product: conceptual understandings around multiplication. In this

lesson, the teacher used manipulatives, images, as well as students’ bodies to create formulas on

the board that illustrate how multiplication works. She started by asking a group of students to

come to the front of the class. Then she gave each student three pieces of fake fruit. Each student

was asked how many pieces of fruit they had while the teacher wrote their responses and thus the

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formula on the board: 3 + 3 + 3 + 3. She described how there were four students and each student

had three pieces of fruit. This activity was replicated with images of dogs on the board (how

many paws does each of the five dogs have? Tails? Etc.) The teacher also replicated this with

student body parts including legs, hands, fingers, etc. The students and the teacher worked

together to create the context for the formula and then captured it on the board and talked about

the connection between the numbers on the board and the real life images or body parts that

helped to create the formula. What was particularly striking was how accessible this class was to

the non-Finnish speaking observers in the observation group. We visited many classrooms over a

period of several days and some of which were very difficult to observe because the language

truly stood in the way of us understanding what was happening in the class. But this was an

example of both meaningful collaboration among the teachers and the students in a whole class

setting and strong contextualization, which made understanding the lesson much easier and less

language dependent for those of us who didn’t know Finnish.

In contrast, in our own classrooms as well as in classrooms we have observed, we’ve

seen students sitting together in groups, but doing independent work. It is easy for teachers to

create activities that actually do not require collaboration. It can also be a challenge for teachers

if they create an activity requiring collaboration and students aren’t yet prepared to be good

collaborators with one another. Therefore, in order to create strong opportunities for joint

productive activity to occur in classrooms, it is important to teach students how to collaborate

well and create accountability mechanisms to ensure the context for true joint productivity is

developed.

We recommend that teachers and students work together to learn to be great

collaborators with one another. By setting clear expectations together, co-constructing sentence

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stems to support effective communication practices during collaborative work learning about and

practicing roles to play during collaborative activities, teachers and students can learn to truly

collaborate in ways that that are productive and successful. It is important for teachers to take the

time to teach students the skills demanded in collaboration. Some teachers do this via role plays

and skits, some do it by gradually building skills to grow in the complexity of collaboration

engaged in at the classroom level, but all teachers who successfully implement joint productive

activity have done work to ensure that students know what to do in their collaborations and have

the tools and resources to be successful collaborators. The CREDE resources guide teachers in

how to use briefing and debriefing times before and after collaborations. These are specific times

to set expectations for how things should go in the collaboration and then to follow up and

resolve any problems that might have come up during the activity. In order for joint productive

activity to successfully occur, teachers need to build instruction around successful collaboration

into their learning plans, regardless of the age of the students.

Some common agreements that teachers and students might make around collaboration

expectations include: no one is done until everyone is done, communicate respectfully, seek

solutions together, and treat every member of the group as an important collaborator. Another

aspect of successful collaboration that needs to be learned and constantly taught, modeled and

improved on is conflict resolution and civil discourse.

Part of teaching students to collaborate well is giving them tools to engage in discussions

with people where there might be disagreements. One great tool is the “ARE” method (from

Teaching Tolerance). “A” stands for “assertion,” “R” for “reasoning” and “E” for “evidence.”

Teaching students to make claims with a reason and evidence when they are engaging with ideas

where there might be disagreement, is a helpful way to assist students in learning to be good

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communicators across difference. Because multilingual classrooms are impacted by the larger

sociopolitical context, students also need to learn to listen for understanding, find compromise,

as well as deal with issues of power and privilege that play out in classroom spaces. We

recommend engaging with a wide variety of modules in this book to learn more about how to do

these things well in your classroom. Teaching students the ARE method and creating the

expectation for its use in the learning community is a great place to start. More information

regarding how to do this is found in our resources and strategies section.

One challenge most teachers face in developing effective joint productive activities is the

need to hold all students accountable for their contributions to the joint product. For this reason,

teachers often fall back on creating activities where students sit together, but do independent

work. There are times and reasons for this practice, but such tasks are neither collaboration nor

joint productive activity. There is no joint product and students can easily sit in silence and work

independently without any interaction. However, there are many successful ways to design joint

productive activities while also having accountability measures to ensure student learning,

engagement, and participation.

First, when the teacher positions herself as a collaborator with the group, she is instantly

able to gather data on participation and engagement while also helping to apprentice students

into positive collaboration practices, as well as content understandings and language

development opportunities. For this reason, the most desirable context for joint productive

activity is when the teacher engages in collaboration around a joint product with a small group of

students, something that will be discussed in further depth later in this Explore section of the

module. Second, there are a variety of other ways that teachers can hold students accountable for

their contributions to jointly produced work. Exit tickets can be required with targeted questions

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and expected responses that provide evidence of student participation in the group collaboration.

Peer assessments can be strong tools for accountability in collaborative group work as are

informal observations and conversations with students regarding their collaborative work. Some

teachers set up the expectation that after students have worked in groups, anyone in the group

should be ready to be called on to talk about the group’s work to the class. Other teachers require

that when a tangible product is developed, students indicate their individual contribution by

using a specific color marker, pen or even font when the work is done electronically.

Essentially, the notion of joint productive activity is a strong idea to support the

development of powerful collaboration opportunities in classes among students, but also with the

teacher. To successfully accomplish this, teachers should explicitly teach students the requisite

skills and abilities to be productive collaborators in groups with other students as well as with the

teacher. Further, setting up strong accountability measures can help scaffold and support strong

collaboration around joint products in the classroom. In the next section, we will explore why

collaboration is especially important for multilingual learners in the content classroom. And in

the resources and strategies section, several tools are provided to successful put all of this into

practice.

Collaboration as Authentic Context for Language and Content Development

Second language acquisition theories and research consistently underscore the need for

language learners to engage in authentic communicative contexts. Essentially, our language

development is directly related to the contexts in which we communicate. We develop the

communicative skills we need to navigate the contexts we live and engage in. For some of us this

means we speak multiple languages. For instance, Nancy has spent a great deal of time in

Finland and thus speaks quite a bit of Finnish, but also lived in Mexico and speaks Spanish much

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more fluently. Kara on the other hand was an exchange student to Germany and majored in

German in college, but married into a family from Mexico and therefore now speaks Spanish on

a regular basis in her home and with her family. These contexts have created the opportunities

for us to learn languages other than English. They have also motivated and engaged us in

learning to be able to communicate using different resources in different contexts. These same

ideas apply to different registers of a language.

Within any language there are many different registers or communicative contexts for

that language. There are plenty of contexts in which English is spoken where, based on the life

experiences we have had to date, we might not understand even though we are extremely

proficient speakers of English. An example of this was the first time Kara took a statistics course

in graduate school. After 10 minutes of class, she texted her brother wondering out-loud if the

class was being taught in English? The class was very much being taught in English, but since

Kara, despite having multiple degrees from prestigious institutions and having lived in various

places around the world as well as being multilingual, had never had any experience with the

content, concepts or language of statistic. Being in this new communicative context was a real

linguistic challenge.

The same is true for our multilingual students. They come to classrooms with rich

linguistic histories as they have spent their lives communicating, building relationships, playing

and engaging with the world around them. But those communicative contexts may not have

required the same kinds of language skills that are used in schools in the U.S. ‘Learning

English’ in U.S. schools, requires student to know how to use English in a variety of registers,

since the way language is used is quite different in each of the content areas (e.g. math, social

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studies, etc.). In order for students to learn the language of schooling well, they need to use the

language of schooling themselves. This is a fundamental fact of language development.

The need for multilingual students to use the language they are learning should not be

confused as a reason to enforce “English Only” policies. Teachers should allow students to use

all of the language skills they have--their full ‘linguistic repertoire’-- to help them build new

language skills and conceptual understandings. From this point of view in order to provide the

greatest opportunities for learning, students should be encouraged to use languages other than

English, as well as what are sometimes termed ‘non-standard’ dialects in class to discuss ideas,

build conceptual understandings and even to present their thinking. However, students should

also be given opportunities to grow their linguistic repertoire to include the expectations of

different language registers like science and mathematics. This means students will need chances

to build their vocabulary, but more importantly, contexts in which they can practice that

vocabulary, apply new understandings and develop their ability to engage in the content and

language they are learning. This is why creating meaningful collaboration opportunities for

multilingual students is so important. By engaging in joint productive activity with their peers or

with the teacher (or another adult), multilingual students are given the needed context to talk and

use language for authentic purposes, thus expanding their linguistic repertoire. This is

fundamentally important for supporting strong language and concept development for

multilingual students. This was borne out in our study examining the successful teaching

practices of content teachers in Germany, Finland, the U.S. and the U.K. where we consistently

found high levels of collaboration. While that collaboration looked different in each classroom

and in each context, students were frequently and consistently given the opportunity to jointly

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produce with their peers as well as with their teacher(s), an important feature of creating the

context for strong language development to occur.

Teachers as Collaborators

Knowing how important collaboration is in the classroom for multilingual students, it is

necessary to expand our ideas around what collaboration can and should look like in content

classrooms. Even in the classrooms of teachers with a reputation for excellence in working with

multilingual students where our research frequently noted the presence of joint productive

activity, that collaboration was most often occurring in student groups or with the students and

teacher working together in a whole class setting. While there is value in these approaches, other

research has illustrated the power of taking collaboration in classrooms to the next level—when

the teacher positions herself as a collaborator with a small group of students and not simply

“roving” the classroom during collaboration time. In our experience (research) during small

group work, teachers typically walk through the room, responding to questions groups have and

helping keep students on task, as well as moving forward with the assigned activity. Obviously,

there is benefit to this approach. But what we want to explore here is the possibility of preparing

students to work so well together that this need for teacher roving becomes less necessary so that

the teacher can position herself as a collaborator with a small group of students for an extended

period of time. For those familiar with guided reading strategies, this is typically what happens.

During guided reading, the teacher often collaborates with a small group of students while the

rest of the class engages collectively or independently (or a mixture of both) in a variety of

literacy activities. At times, guided reading with the teacher in a small group may not actually be

joint productive activity. So, we need to be clear about what we are suggesting here—not just the

physical arrangement of the teacher sitting with a small group of students while the rest of the

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class works collaboratively or independently—but the actual interaction that occurs within that

physical arrangement of joint productive work where students and teachers co-produce.

When the teachers is positioned as a collaborator with a small group of students, several

wonderful and important possibilities are created. First, the teacher has the opportunity to teach

through doing with students. Such a teaching approach is more like an apprentice model for

teaching and learning and provides students with access to important assistance and scaffolding

to accomplish challenging things together that they aren’t yet ready to do on their own (think

Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development here). The teacher can play a strategic collaborating

role guiding students, modeling for students, and pushing students to higher levels of thinking

and understanding. Second, by positioning herself as a full collaborator with a small group of

students, the teacher has the opportunity to strategically differentiate for all groups of students

and in meaningful ways. The teacher who is collaborating with a small group of students will

learn very quickly what the strengths and opportunities for growth are for each member of that

group. This information can inform future instructional decisions as well as in the moment

scaffolds and differentiation. The teacher can help each group they work with have the

meaningful collaboration opportunity that makes sense to support the specific learning

opportunities that exist within that specific group, even when using a similar text or exploring a

similar topic across all the groups in the classroom. Third, the data a teacher collects from

positioning herself as a full-collaborator with a small group of students can not only inform

differentiation decisions and practices, but all instructional practices across the class. As teachers

collaborate with students to jointly produce either a tangible or intangible product they encounter

things that are deeply relevant to understanding students’ abilities, strengths and opportunities

for growth. We’ve seen teachers create charts to keep track of the skills they see students

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demonstrate as they collaborate on joint products. Such charts provide helpful insights and data

to reflect on later in planning or grading. Embedding thoughtful assessment practices into

meaningful collaboration opportunities between a teacher and a small group of students becomes

truly seamless.

As we have learned about this pedagogical approach and applied it into our own teaching,

we have seen important shifts in our own teaching practice. We get to know our students better

and more quickly. Even at the university level, we have tools to thoughtfully differentiate and

engage in ongoing assessment practices. We regularly have thoughtful, learning oriented

conversations with our students in order to grapple with important ideas, seek solutions as well

as explore various issues together. And our students love it. They love getting access to working

with us more frequently as well as more in depth than simply staring at a powerpoint. As we

know, relationships between teachers and students play a critical role in supporting high levels of

learning. When you organize your classroom to be able to collaborate meaningfully with your

students in small groups in joint productive activity, you create the context for strong

relationships to develop with each of your students. We simply cannot recommend this practice

enough. Nor could the research be more consistent. Various forms of collaboration in classrooms

are important, but when teachers engage in this kind of collaboration with students (in small

group joint productive activity), learning soars.

CLASSROOM SNAPSHOT

An 8th grade science teacher is collaborating with a small group of students to analyze

data they collected during an in-class lab. She plans to do this analysis with each group in the

class and has therefore set up multiple learning options for students to engage with either

independently or in groups/pairs while she works with each small group. During the time she is

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collaborating with one group of students, the other students know to monitor their own learning

and behavior, something they have talked about and set expectations for nearly every day of the

entire school year.

In the small group, the teacher asks the group to first show her their data and discuss it

with them. How many trials did they run? What variables did they manipulate as they explored

different possibilities? What was the outcome of manipulating those variables? After they have

discussed the data and these kinds of questions, and caught the teacher up to speed with their

work, the teacher asks the students, “So, what do these data mean?” The students look around at

each other and sit in silence. “OK,” the teacher says, “Let’s start with the topic we are learning

about: friction. What is friction?” The students begin discussing their understandings of friction,

which the teacher realizes are too shallow to engage meaningfully with the data in this moment.

She quickly changes her plans for data analysis (something that they will still get to later) and

asks the students to set up the lab again and show her their most successful version of the marble

going down the ramp and pushing the index card they folded the farthest. The students do this

while the teacher probes with questions throughout the process. Then she asks the students to set

up the least successful instance. Again, the students do this while the teacher probes with

questions throughout the process. After the two scenarios have been tested out and thoroughly

discussed, the teacher asks, “so what was the main difference between the most successful

instance of your experiment and the least successful?” The students pointed out that it was the

surface they used. One surface was smoother, the other surface was rougher. “OK, why would

that matter for this experiment?” Almost as if a light-bulb had gone off in one of the student’s

heads, she excitedly explains, “The rough surface creates more friction! When the index card is

being pushed by the marble on the smooth surface, there is less friction than when the index card

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is being pushed by the marble on the rough surface. This is why it goes further!” It appears that

other students were starting to understand this better, so the teacher encourages each student to

talk a bit about what they saw and understood. With five minutes left to work together in the

group, the teacher re-directs them to their data for analysis. They have an analysis rubric that

they should complete as a group and start to go over it. One of the students in the facilitator role

turns to the teacher and says, “Miss. We got this. I totally get this now. When our time with you

runs out, can we keep working on this as a group and have you look at our work on our way out

of class?” “Sure thing,” the teacher replies as she begins to collect her things to get ready to work

with the next group. Her work with the next group looks very different as they were ready to

jump right into the analysis rubric and therefore, she spent her time with that group co-analyzing

the data as well as completing the analysis rubric together. Her commitment to each group is to

be a full collaborator, but to also re-direct the activities through prompts, questions, rephrasing

and discussion in order to ensure the highest levels of learning possible for each of her students.

Resources and Strategies

The following resources and strategies are offered in greater depth with complementing,

downloadable tools on our companion website.

Collaboration Planning Template. On Canvas is a tool we developed based on the ideas

of joint productive activity and the CREDE Standards for Effective Pedagogy. This tool walks

you through planning for meaningful collaboration by thinking through three important stages:

plan, engage and reflect.

Collaboration Self-Assessment Tools. On Canvas are strategies and suggestions for

helping students self-assess their collaboration skills in advance of collaborating as well as after.

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We have also offered some reflective questions for you to consider as you collaborate in joint

productive activities with students (both before and after).

Collaboration Skills. Students need the opportunity to proactively and regularly learn

and grown in their collaboration skills. Such skills including communication skills, managing

conflict, collaborative problem solving, and shared responsibility. One great way to do this is to

co-define the features of each of these skills (communication, managing conflict, collaborative

problem solving and shared responsibility) and then work regularly in class to show what it is

and what it isn’t. Creating skits, role plays as well as examining cases together are good places to

start with this kind of work. For more resources regarding building collaboration skills, please

see the resource shared on Canvas.

Roles for Group Work. Some teachers have established roles for group work with clear

expectations for each role as well as sentence starters for how students will be able to play out

that role successfully. They have nametags and notecards with the information that students need

to perform that role. Other teachers create a variety of roles depending on the context of the

learning activity and the type of group work that is being engaged with. There is no one right

way to do roles for group work. There is, however, always and consistently a need to proactively

and explicitly teach students how to play out the different roles in the group. This work can be

done through role plays, skits as well as case studies. It can and must be done consistently and

explicitly across the school year. Students benefit from exploring both what to do in a particular

role as well as what not to do. And it is best when students help to construct the expectations for

the roles as well as the consequences for not meeting those co-constructed expectations when

that happens. We recommend looking at various resources online regarding student roles in

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group work and considering what is valuable for you in your classroom and content area then

developing an approach that makes the most sense for you.

CREDE Books/Resources. The considerable work that has been done around the

CREDE Standards for Effective Pedagogy is worth engaging with. We especially recommend

the following book from 2000 by Roland Tharp and his colleagues, “Teaching Transformed:

Achieving Excellence, Fairness, Inclusion and Harmony.” We also recommend Annela

Teemant’s work (for example: http://minnetesoljournal.org/journal-archive/mtj-2015-2/living-

critical-sociocultural-theory-in-classroom-practice/), particularly for how she has added Critical

Stance to the original five standards.

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