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.

Stop wrestling with messy group projects and start designing teamwork that works.

By Sara Candela, DTT Head of Community

Our Deep Thoughts channel closes at the end of this week, but before it goes, we wanted to revisit a few of these summer threads that we think are worth carrying into the new school year.

One discussion thread started with a question from educator Peter Pappas, writing back in 2011. He argued that if we want students who can actually think on their feet, we have to stop scaffolding everything for them:

What he’s really asking is how we assess the value of the degree to which we are there to help students. Matt points out the tension a lot of us feel:

He connected it to "desirable difficulties,” which is a concept from Make It Stick by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel. The idea is that the struggles we're tempted to smooth over are often exactly what makes learning stick. Productive friction, not frictionless delivery. As educators, we are very familiar with the need for friction and struggle. But it’s so common for us to put efficiency over really letting students have the time they need to spend energy on struggle.

That's an exercise that’s worth bringing into September. Just take an honest look: pick a task or unit you tend to over-scaffold, the one where you're tempted to hand students the path before they've had to find it themselves. Can you pull one support away and see what happens? Where's the edge between struggle and real frustration?

You can contribute to the discussion by jumping into the Deep Thoughts for Summer channel here; now’s your last chance before we archive them for fall.

You can join the free DTT Community to read ideas like this, connect with other educators, discuss, and share ideas of your own.

When I went back into the classroom recently to teach high school Spanish, I had an "aha" moment. I started using AI image generators to make silly pictures for our vocabulary lessons—like animals playing basketball. The pictures were fun, but they were also full of weird AI glitches: extra fingers, funky basketball court lines, weird text!

So, I started pointing out the weirdness and asking my students questions: Why did AI do that? What prompt do you think I used? What surprises you here?

Without even trying to teach a "formal" tech lesson, we were doing AI literacy!

At the SchoolAI booth at ISTELive, I shared how ANY teacher in ANY subject can pull this off using what I call Embedded AI Literacy.

Here are three super practical takeaways you can try in your classroom tomorrow:

At the end of the day, AI literacy isn't about getting kids to use more chatbots; it’s about teaching them to ask better questions and rely on their own human thinking first.

Over the past couple weeks, we’ve looked into collaborative learning to find out when it is most successful.

So far, to this point, we’ve found …

Read more about any of those by clicking the links above.

After that, you might ask …

“OK, but what does that look like in a classroom setting? Are there collaborative activities I can plug and play into my lesson plans?”

The answer? As long as the type of work lends itself to collaboration (based on the above), the answer is YES.

Here are a few collaborative learning structures you can use with students to get them thinking and working together.

🎁 FYI: We’re working on a new FREE resource called “The DTT Ultimate Guide to Classroom Collaboration.” It will include everything we’ve covered about collaborative work — AND provide 12 collaborative thinking structures like the ones below. We plan to share it on THURSDAY … so keep an eye out!

👥 DISCUSS: Share your best collaboration/group work tips here.

Students are so used to being pressured to come up with good answers, good solutions, good ideas. What if we asked them to generate bad ones?

Use it when: Students need to generate ideas, uncover criteria, solve a problem, or think beyond obvious answers.

Give students a problem or challenge. But instead of asking for the best solution, ask them to create terrible solutions. Groups generate lots of bad ideas. They can combine them, exaggerate them, or compete to create the worst idea possible.

Students ask:

This is an established thinking routine from Harvard’s Project Zero — and it leads to great collaborative thinking and brainstorming.

Use it when: Students have lots of information or ideas and need to make meaning from them.

Students first generate important ideas related to the topic. Then they sort them into categories, groups, or patterns. Next, they connect ideas and explain the relationships they see. Finally, they elaborate by adding new ideas, implications, questions, examples, or explanations.

Questions they ask to organize ideas:

Learn more — AND get a printable PDF template — here.

QFT has been around for a while and it’s STILL a great way to get students asking more questions (which generates great thinking).

Use it when: Students need to investigate something, launch inquiry, or figure out which questions are worth pursuing.

Give students something to stimulate discussion: an image, phenomenon, quotation, problem, data set, artifact, scenario, or statement.

Instead of immediately giving students the questions, have them generate the questions. Groups produce questions without immediately trying to answer them. Then students examine, improve, organize, and prioritize their questions.

Finally, they ask: Which questions are most important? Which could lead somewhere interesting? What would we need to do to answer them?

Learn more and get a QFT one-pager here.

We’re still collecting your best ideas to group/collaborative work! Share them in this discuss thread — or just jump over there to see what others are saying!

Don’t miss the webinar on collaborative learning on Tuesday, hosted by Samsung! Register for free here.

Remember, we’re pulling our best collaborative learning ideas together in our Ultimate Guide to Classroom Collaboration. Keep an eye out on Thursday!

There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education: