The workforce is looking for collaborative skills
I’ve been thinking a lot about collaboration in the classroom lately.
According to the most recent NACE Job Outlook report, the top attributes that employers were looking for in new hires?
Problem-solving skills
Ability to work in a team
I think that lots of us imagine that collaborative work could be beneficial … but if you’re like me, you’ve been burned by bad group work enough times that it makes you skeptical.
Our recent deep dive into great collaborative work has been helpful …
Last week, we looked at why group work stinks (and how to fix it).
In our DTT online community, we’ve been discussing our best tips and ideas for collaborative work.
Next week, I’ll be part of a webinar (sponsored by Samsung) about classroom collaboration in action.
… and today, we’ll look at TWO keys to great collaboration — structure and roles (with examples of each!).
Inside:
📺 Free Webinar — Teamwork by Design: Classroom Collaboration in Action
👀 DTT Digest: 4 resources worth checking out
👥 Community Discussion: What are you ditching this year?
🎯 Quick Teaching Strategy: 60-Second Strategy: Read-Aloud Quick Sketch
💡 The Big Idea: Great collaborative work needs structure and roles
😄 Smile of the day: Slime and flossing … now this?!?
👋 How we can help
📺 Free Webinar — Teamwork by Design: Classroom Collaboration in Action
Assigning group work is easy. Making sure every student actually participates, learns, and builds real-world skills? That’s where things get tricky.
If you've ever watched a group project devolve into one student doing all the work while others drift away, you aren't alone. Collaboration is a critical skill for students, but it requires intentional design—and the right digital tools—to succeed.
Join us for a free, practical webinar: Teamwork by Design: Classroom Collaboration in Action. We’ll break down proven strategies to structure group work effectively and leverage technology for better student outcomes.
When: Tuesday, Sept 8 at 5:00 PM EDT / 2:00 PM PDT
Where: Online
Cost: 100% Free
Stop wrestling with messy group projects and start designing teamwork that works.
👀 DTT Digest
4 teaching resources worth checking out today
🧘🏾 Free mindfulness coloring pages — Sometimes we all just need a little brain break. These mindfulness coloring pages from Canva can be downloaded and printed as is or edit them to make your own.
🏢 Teaching about 9/11 — This collection of resources contains original short films, each accompanied by a lesson plan and student activity. In addition, you will find a recording of our Educator Webinar and links to resources.
📚 Storyvoice is back! — Join read-alouds, draw-alongs, and live Q&As with top authors, illustrators, and more.
👥 Random partner generator — Create random student partners or groups with a spinning wheel. Paste your class list, choose students per group, and watch the wheel fairly assign every student automatically.
📢 FROM THE COMMUNITY - TOP DISCUSSION 📢
🗑️ What are you ditching this year?
Last week, we asked the DTT community: what's on your "ditch list" this school year? What are you finally leaving behind? How does it make you feel to be stepping into the year without that one thing? Is it being replaced, simplified, or simply freeing up some much-needed space?
The answers we’ve received so far are varied and thoughtful:
Sherri's going technology-free after three years of interactive notebooks (though Blooket's sticking around)
Ivy's ditching the urge to cram too much into one day - "go slow to go fast" - and finding she's more present, a better listener, and gives more meaningful feedback as a result
Dawn's swapping annotated bibliographies for a more engaging research project
Christine's paring down her ed tech tools to just the best few
And we’re curious: what's on your list? Come add yours to the discussion, and if you're wondering what Sherri's interactive notebook setup looks like, that thread's worth a read too!
Join the conversation → What are you ditching this year?
Tell us your answer and we may share it next week on our social channels to celebrate the fresh start of a new school year…
Not a member yet? Join the free DTT Community to read ideas like this, connect with other educators, discuss, and share ideas of your own.
🎯 QUICK TEACHING STRATEGY 🎯
📖 60-Second Strategy: Read-Aloud Quick Sketch
This strategy boosts comprehension and long-term recall during class read-alouds. In this Edutopia 60 second strategy educator Chey Cheney walks you through how to implement it in your class.
Set Up the Page: Have students write the book's title and author right in the center of a blank page, then draw a thick, winding road looping around it to divide the page into visual sections.
Sketch While Listening: As you read aloud, students fill the spaces along the road with quick images, key vocabulary words, or memorable quotes that stand out to them.
Lock In the Learning: Visual note-taking anchors key information in students' long-term memory. When they reflect back on their drawings later, it acts as a visual trigger to easily retrieve and discuss what they heard.
It is a simple, highly practical activity to keep students actively engaged during your next reading passage.
💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡
🫱🏻🫲🏾 Great collaborative work needs structure and roles
Roles and structure can help collaborative work. (ChatGPT image)
I was just talking to a fellow teacher about his frustrations with collaborative work.
“You have to have motivated students,” he was telling me. “I don't think group work will work at this level. It can only be successful in higher education.”
I have to be honest. And my own teaching experience, I've become really disenchanted with group work and collaborative learning in the past.
Many times, we put students into groups. It seems promising! We've heard good things about it.
And then the activity flops.
We’ve been discussing this dynamic — and how collaborative work can thrive — in this discussion thread in our free online community. (Check it out to see what others are saying — and add your own tips, too!)
There are lots of reasons that collaborative learning flops. Last week, I wrote about some of the keys to collaborative work, including
finding questions/tasks that are complex enough to justify multiple brains in a group
letting students think alone BEFORE grouping up
helping students understand how collaborative work thrives
That last one deserves a closer look. It’s hard enough for adults to envision great collaborative work, let alone students!
Let’s look at two areas that can help — structure and roles.
Collaborative work thrives on STRUCTURE and ROLES
When the team doesn't have specific roles, everyone sits down together. They kind of look around at each other. And then they try to get to the finished product as quickly as possible so they can be done.
(At least that's what I've seen many times in the past!)
Here's the bigger problem …
If the teacher doesn't even know the roles that the group members should play in collaborative work, then how are the students supposed to know?
Sure, in some cases, it's nice to have some room for flexibility so the group can adapt to the task.
But a little bit of structure can go a long way.
Identifying a STRUCTURE for a collaborative work
Really, when we design collaborative work, we can do the same reverse lesson design process that we learned in our teacher prep programs in college.
Start with the end in mind. Work your way backward.
Identify the kinds of tasks and thinking and discussions that students will need to get to the end.
When we put ourselves in the shoes of the students and think about the process that it takes to get to the end goal, it can help us identify the major building blocks of the process.
And when we see those building blocks, we can help our students see what the overall structure looks like.
Think — on your own
Add — contribute from your thinking
Build — and extend upon their classmates' thinking
Organize — giving structure to the ideas
Justify — explain their decisions (and work from above tasks)
Synthesize — pull it all together into something meaningful
The structure of the collaborative work time doesn't have to look like this, of course. But helping them to see some steps that they might take can prevent students from feeling lost and just trying to shortcut to the end.
Structure is good. But knowing what your role is in the collaborative learning process can help, too.
12 participant ROLES for collaborative work
Here's a list of 12 roles that students might play to push the learning forward.
Connector — Finds relationships between ideas. “These two seem connected because…”
Expander — Takes promising ideas and pushes them further. “What else could we do with this?”
Challenger — Tests ideas, assumptions, and conclusions without attacking the person. “What might be wrong with this?”
Organizer — Looks for patterns and helps group, separate, sequence, combine, clarify, or categorize ideas.
Gap finder — Looks for what the group hasn’t considered yet. “What are we missing?”
Evidence seeker — Pushes the group to support its thinking with evidence, examples, data, or reasoning.
Perspective seeker — Introduces viewpoints the group may be overlooking. “Who might see this differently?”
Questioner — Generates questions that help the group investigate rather than rushing toward an answer.
Prioritizer — Helps determine which ideas deserve the group's attention and why.
Skeptic — Deliberately looks for weaknesses, unintended consequences, counterarguments, or reasons an idea might fail.
Consensus builder — Identifies areas of agreement and helps the group work through meaningful disagreement without simply taking a quick vote.
Synthesizer — Pulls several contributions together into a larger conclusion, explanation, solution, or new idea.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be limited to this … and you don’t need to use all (or even most!) of these. But these roles are focused on big thinking tasks, so there’s plenty of application across the board.
Use AI to help give collaborative work structure
You don't have to come up with an organization and roles by yourself! It can help provide some extra perspective.
Here's a prompt you can copy into an AI assistant that will help you think through this process …
I'm planning a collaborative learning activity. Help me make sure students are doing meaningful thinking together—not just completing group work.
Grade/subject: [INSERT]
What students are learning: [INSERT]
Task: [INSERT]
Desired outcome: [INSERT]
Other context: [time, group size, resources, student needs, etc.]
First, tell me whether collaboration is a good fit. What can multiple minds contribute that students working individually would miss? If collaboration doesn't add much value, tell me and suggest how I could improve the task.
Then suggest:
Individual thinking first: What should students think about or produce on their own before collaborating?
Collaborative process: Give me a simple sequence for how students should work with each other's ideas—not just divide up the work.
Student roles: Suggest 3–5 useful thinking roles for this task (such as Connector, Challenger, Organizer, Evidence Seeker, Gap Finder, Perspective Seeker, or Synthesizer). Explain each role briefly and give it a useful question students can ask.
Shared outcome: What should the group create, decide, solve, or understand together?
Individual accountability: How can I make sure every student is thinking and learning?
Keep the plan simple, practical, and classroom-ready. Don't add collaboration or structure where it doesn't improve the learning.
Share your tips for collaborative work
How do you do collaborative work? What are your best tips and ideas to make it meaningful and successful for your students?
We've been discussing this in a discussion thread in our online community.
😄 Smile of the day
You can do this … we believe in you …
👋 How we can help
There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:
Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.
Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.
Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!
