You can do a Collaboration Skill Builder in your internship classroom AFTER Week 4
STEP 1: Introduce students to the purpose of the activity (i.e., to learn how to work together with their classmates) & pass out materials
STEP 2: Read the instructions for the activity
STEP 3: Walk around and observe students as they work to complete the activity
(1) Make sure that students understand and follow the rules. Look for students who might not want to break up their completed circles and share their pieces. Remind them that they are not done until everyone is done.
(2) Identify specific examples of what groups did in order to be successful in the activity. (e.g., breaking up a circle and giving pieces to others; looking at others pieces to see what others need)
STEP 4: Discuss the activity as a whole class and help students identify important norms that help groups collaborate successfully.
Your goal for the activity is to make two norms for collaboration explicit to students, not to teach mathematics. However, there are some opportunities for highlighting mathematics related to circles and fractions - especially for those groups who finish early and figure out how to make the circles a different way. If you mentor teachers wants to highlight some of those mathematical ideas, then you can cooperate with them to extend the lesson to teach mathematics after the 15-20 minute collaboration skill builder. Students who are new to group work need time to focus on learning to collaborate without having to worry about learning new mathematical ideas.
After your collaboration skill builder, take some time to reflect. If your mentor teacher is open to reflecting with you, I encourage you to reflect together on what happened. Think about what you'd like to share with the class. This is an informal share (i.e., you don't need to prepare a presentation), but you should come prepared with a specific talking point. These questions might guide your reflection and help you identify what you'd like to share with the class about your experience:
If you and your mentor teacher agree, you can do more collaboration skill builders. I'd recommend doing a more advanced version of broken circles first. This will allow students to use norms that they've become familiar with to complete a more challenging task. Then, you can move to other skill builders that highlight different collaboration norms.
Keep in mind that collaboration skill builders not meant for students to learn new mathematics. Instead, the focus is on learning to collaborate with their classmates so that they can be success working with others to do mathematics. But many of these skill builders have opportunities to connect to mathematics content or they can be adapted to teach new mathematics. If you want to pursue these possibilities, I encourage you to do it in collaboration with your mentor teacher.
Your textbook (Smarter Together), Cohen (Appendix A), and this website provide other collaboration skill builders that you can use.