Lesson 2 of 4 from a Virtual Expedition
In a virtual learning environment, how do we foster collaboration?
Technology seems to force us into large group formats or breakout rooms. Having everyone in the main virtual room that make small team collaboration impossible, while moving teams to breakout rooms prevents us from scanning the “classroom” to read each team’s body language, conversation, etc.
It may have been frustrating at first, but Clyde Cole learned Lesson #2 from our first virtual Expedition earlier this month. As he admitted to the “Curiosity Files” team, “I had trouble perceiving any teamwork happening because of the virtual environment.”
This forced Clyde to ask some essential questions:
What’s my role in this? How should I be involved? How should I be checking?
What kinds of conversations with the students should I be having?
What am I hearing?
You only ask those kinds of questions once you’ve run into a brick wall. Eventually Clyde realized, “Teamwork was happening in so many ways… it was my inability to pick up on it happening.” Once he shifted his wrong mental model from “keeping an eye on students” to “spotting evidence and asking good questions,” he could see student teamwork right in front of him.
Long before COVID-19, we knew we needed to shift learning from a single player sport to a team sport (H/T Jaime Casap). We knew that we needed to shift the center of gravity from teachers to teams of learners. And of course we knew that assessing collaborative work cannot possibly look the same as assessing individual work.
In virtual learning, “The Power of Teamwork” can be as strong as ever—if we can be more curious than certain about our roles and about evidence of learning.
As the ancient wisdom goes, you can’t pour new wine into old wineskins.
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