Supporting Peer Collaboration

Collaboration means that students rely on each other throughout a project that they could never accomplish individually. Group members have different strengths that they bring to a project. According to Dr. Pam Grossman and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania (USA), teachers must support students to:

1. learn how to depend on each other, to apply individual strengths together to solve a problem or to develop a project, and

2. make choices together on how to proceed with a project.

In an interview, English teacher PJ Andrade explains the importance of arranging groups in an effective way for his students to complete a video project. One strategy PJ used was to place students respected by their classmates for their leadership skills in each project group so that students could confidently work together. PJ explained to the groups that collaborating in an interdependent way was important for the project to work, and he checked in with them to make sure that groups were functioning appropriately in a project that students worked on outside of school hours. In this way, PJ supported collaboration. View the students' video on the right about the Charles Darwin Research Station to see the result of their collaboration.