Collaborating Productively

My Understanding 

In my opinion, Collaborating Productively means working together to complete a goal or an assignment. For group projects, there are multiple ways to use this Sustainability Skill - you could split the work your group has to do into smaller jobs and assign those jobs to individual people, or have everyone do their part of the project individually but have plenty of check-ins to make sure everyone is on the same page. 

Some jobs in your group could include leading, organizing, and planning. The reason you could have these roles is that they help speed up the process of reaching your goal, and they can be specifically matched to students’ strengths. If someone has great leadership skills, they should be a leader, and if someone has amazing organizational skills, they should coordinate the project. However, if you are the leader, you have to sometimes step down and let others share their ideas and opinions. It is also important to balance the amount of time you spend listening and speaking. If you talk too much, it may come across as being bossy, and not talking at all could signal low participation. Students can also bond more when working together in their roles. 

Collaborating Productively means knowing that working together is more efficient than working alone. It’s knowing that the more people working together, the faster you will complete your goal. You will also get a much higher quality product when working together as opposed to working independently. You need to make sure that everyone in your group is doing something, and that the work is balanced. No one should be doing more work than another person (unless they want to), in my opinion. 

I think that listening to each other is one of the most important parts of this Sustainability Skill. You should have an open mind, welcome any idea, and choose the best one based on everyone’s perspectives. If you talk over others or ignore them, this isn’t Collaborating Productively because you are not working together. 

You also have to be kind when giving feedback to others about their ideas, opinions, or anything! Telling someone they did a “terrible job" or their idea is “the worst you’ve ever heard of” would be stomping on their confidence and willingness to work with you. Even if you are working alone on a project, you can still Collaborate Productively with your teachers and classmates by asking for feedback. Feedback can help make your project better by pointing out something you could change to make your work the best it can be. 

My Growth

I have been using Collaborating Productively even before I came to SEEQS, for soccer and school. When playing soccer, I have to work together with my teammates to keep possession of the ball and eventually score a goal. You have to pass with each other, communicate, and help each other out if they are in trouble. Every time I work on a group project at school I am using this skill, whether I notice it or not. Sometimes I may be a leader, other times I am an editor or any other role that involves following. My role changes every time! Coming to SEEQS has made me more aware of the importance of this skill and I now know lots of ways to collaborate well with others. 

Exemplary Project

In my 8th grade Social Studies class, called Media, Culture, and Conflict, we were learning about Hawaiian Sovereignty. This was taught by Mr. Dembart, and we did a group project called the “Hawaiian Sovereignty Research Project.”

In this project, we created a final product (slides, google docs, etc.) answering a driving question that our group made from a QFT (question formulation technique). The first step we did in this project was to listen to Haunani Kay-Trask’s speech on Hawaiian Sovereignty to find out what sovereignty is in the first place and why the Hawaiians are fighting for it. Then, we created a QFT (which is a list of every question we can think of at the moment) with our group about the video, asking more questions about the speech and Hawaiian sovereignty. We then decided which question was the most important, and that became our driving question, “What were the events leading up to the speech?” 

After that, I wrote an annotated bibliography, trying to find information answering our driving question. I had to find two credible sources, write information on those sources, evaluate them, and contextualize them. However,we couldn’t find any information answering our driving question. So we just changed our question to “Why are Hawaiians fighting for sovereignty,” and I found my two sources. They are linked here and here, and both give many reasons as to why the Hawaiians are fighting for sovereignty. Some of them are that the Hawaiians have been mistreated and their culture has been used just to attract tourists.  

After everyone in our group individually completed their bibliographies, we chose one out of our two sources each and added that information to our final product. We chose to make our final product a slideshow, and everyone got one slide to put their information on unless they needed more. A photo of my slide (with the black background) is below.  

aConnection to Collaborating Productively 

This project connects to Collaborating Productively because in order to complete it, we broke down the project into steps that each person could do. One step we did was writing the bibliographies. Another step was creating the QFT with all the questions. To create the QFT, we had to work together to ask questions and write them down. Someone would ask a question, and someone else would write it down. 

We also gave each other roles throughout the project. We didn’t say, “you be the leader” or anything, but volunteered to do certain parts of the project. For example, when we were all adding our information to our final product, it was a little chaotic since everyone was adding their information at the same time. I said that I could organize everything and make sure all our information was accurate, giving myself the role of “organizer.” Our leader was  telling everyone what to do (not in a bossy way) and made sure that everyone was focused, and no one was goofing off and playing video games on their iPad. A friend and I also shared the role of making sure that everyone’s grammar was correct. We read through everyone’s information and looked for spelling and other grammar errors. 

A counter-example of Collaborating Productively kind of happened throughout the entire project. One of our classmates was always playing video games on his iPad. We tried to get him to work and fulfill his part of the project, but he would always either shrug us off or say he would, but immediately go back to playing games the second we turned away. The day the project was due, he was scrambling for information and ended up turning in poor quality slides. 

From this project, I learned what sort of impact someone has when they do not do work in a group project. This project also helped me realize what I was doing well and what I could improve on when it came to Collaborating Productively. I was good at leading and following and creating a healthy balance between the two,  but I could work on accepting others’ ideas more. I could also work on including everyone and making sure that we all do an equal amount of work. Throughout this project,  I also saw plenty of examples and counter-examples of Collaborating Productively, which deepened my understanding of this Sustainability Skill.