Building Community through Collaboration by Lesley Roessing

Originally published on January 24, 2016, Ethical ELA is re-posting “Building Community” by Lesley Roessing as a call to all teachers to make building community a priority in the first weeks of your school year and to nurture community every step of the way.

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On my first day of teaching, I was given advice by a veteran teacher on his way out the door. “Five rows of six, “ he instructed, “not six rows of five.”

“Bob” was advising me to keep my students apart, individual, independent, so it would be harder for them to talk to each other and to copy from each other.  Twenty years later, when I was the veteran teacher walking out the door to come to Armstrong, I left a classroom that not only was arranged in six rows of five, those rows were arranged in pairs, so that each student always had a colleague with whom to confer and work, with easy access to two, three, or four others. I learned to always have a deck of cards ready to fan out for quick group selection: Reds, Blacks, Hearts, Diamonds, Aces, 2’s, Evens, Odds.

Over the years I found the most powerful weapon teachers at any grade level has is collaboration. As teachers we need to keep in mind the ultimate goals of our classes: academic, all students learning, and affective, all students learning to work with others. And the best way to accomplish both is through collaboration and cooperation, students supporting students.

In my middle-school Language Arts classroom, students wrote, read, spoke, planned and produced collaboratively. Collaboration, being social, provides motivation and engagement. I found that those students who would not produce work independently, at least did something—and learned something—supported by a partner or group. Learning and knowledge was extended. This strategy is in keeping with Aristotle: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Collaborative projects become enhanced and improved with multiple perspectives, and students begin to appreciate and gain respect for those with knowledge, skills, and experiences divergent from theirs as they became interdependent through collaborative projects and common goals. In collaboration, each person’s contribution is crucial as students pool their resources and talents. The math wiz becomes revered in the ELA classroom when a group needs to design charts and maps; artists are fought over in almost every presentation utilizing design; and the musicians are wooed when persuasive writing includes commercials or grammar-rule songs are composed. And all students benefit from a convenient, engaged audience.

Interdependency opens up possibilities of greater productivity, efficiency, and personal academic and affective growth as members of a group learn to collaborate in mutually beneficial ways and students learn the value of diversity and form a classroom community. An added benefit is the reduction of incidents of bullying when students widen their community, and classrooms are no longer divided into “Us” and “Them” as students gain respect for their classmates. Hopefully, that will spread an even wider net of respect and cause students to rethink their world.

Collaboration is a twenty-first century business skill. Collaboration reflects real-world businesses and situations where professionals collaborate on presentations, reports, and projects. Many businesses are now organized into teams rather than individual workers in departments; many office building—anticipating even more collaboration in the future—are no longer being configured into separate offices or cubicles.

Where is education heading? My fear is that, with the emphasis on testing for individual scores and the continuous collection of individual data, as collaboration in the business world increases, it will decrease in the classroom. As it diminishes in the classroom, so will building classroom and school community, a sense of belonging, and a respect for diversity, reverting to a culture of “us” and “them.” It is imperative that teachers build collaborative communities in their classrooms to make school a safe and supportive place for children and adolescents. It is also essential that teachers help their students acknowledge that they belong to a group together, that they are part of a “we” or “us,” and that any differences—divergent talents, backgrounds, experiences, and skills—only make us stronger and better as they prepare students for a diverse future world.

Lesley Roessing was a high school and middle level teacher in Pennsylvania for over 20 years before packing up, moving south, and becoming Director of the Coastal Savannah Writing Project and Lecturer in the College of Education of Armstrong State University, Savannah, Georgia. She has written four books for educators and students: The Write to Read: Response Journals That Increase Comprehension (Corwin Press, 2009); No More “Us” and “Them”: Classroom Lessons & Activities to Promote Peer Respect (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011); a picture and song book, Comma Quest: The Rules They Followed; The Sentences They Saved (Discover Writing, 2013), and Bridging the Gap: Reading Critically & Writing Meaningfully to Get to the Core (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).