Collaborative Skills for Today's Classroom Teachers

Student-centered learning turns classrooms into active, collaborative spaces where students build meaning and develop essential skills. By emphasizing voice, choice, and relevance, teachers become facilitators rather than lecturers. Research shows this approach boosts retention by up to 30%, while also enhancing motivation and social-emotional growth. Each strategy offers unique cognitive and interpersonal benefits that can be woven into daily instruction. Let’s break down the five strategies from the infographic and explore how they can be meaningfully integrated: Partner Response promotes higher-order thinking and verbal fluency by encouraging students to explain complex ideas to peers ideal for bilingual classrooms where language scaffolding supports deeper reasoning. Think-Write-Pair-Share adds a reflective writing step that strengthens memory and metacognition, helping students articulate ideas with clarity. Quartet Quiz combines peer teaching with formative assessment, using rotating roles to build accountability and cooperative learning. Think, Turn & Talk supports quick processing and inclusive participation, ensuring every student engages in brief, meaningful dialogue. Inside & Outside Circle enhances communication skills and empathy through structured peer rotations, fostering active listening and community building across diverse perspectives. Ultimately, student-centered learning isn’t just a pedagogical shift it’s a philosophical commitment to empowerment, equity, and transformation. It prepares students not just to succeed academically, but to thrive as thoughtful, collaborative, and purpose-driven individuals. #TalkToLearnTransform

My hot take for the day is that the best thing to do in response to genAI in the classroom has nothing to do with genAI. Instead, we should use any disruption to double down on building classroom communities full of trust and an embrace of the frictionful state of learning. 1. Learn students’ names: perhaps one of the highest ROI things you can do to create a foundation for community. 2. Foster metacognitive habits: help student reflect on what they're learning and how. You want to build independent, active learners instead of passive receivers of information. 3. Teach with transparency: don't hide the ball. Put your motivations and pedagogical decisions on the table. 4. Communicate explicit learning objectives: tell them the point of every assignment and what they're supposed to get out of it. 5. Make communication policies clear: tell them how to get a hold of you and set expectations for when they can expect a response. h/t to Robert Talbert for this one. 6. Create frameworks for feedback: help them understand how to give and receive feedback. I really like @kimballscott's framework of Radical Candor for this. 7. Double down on active learning: get them engage in the work of learning. This is fun and often looks a lot like play! Don't just talk at them but get them talking to you and to each other. 8. Encourage experimentation: iterative improvement and failure is the way. 9. Cultivate community: help them fully leverage the rich relational web that is in the background of every classroom. This is so often untapped. 10. Connect individually with each student: it might be challenging, but do your best to get to know each student as an individual person. Feeling like you're seen and that you belong matters. 11. Build shared responsibility for learning: teacher and student both have to bring something to the table for learning in the classroom to happen. Call this out explicitly and have a conversation about what everyone is bringing. 12. Get alongside students: try to avoid being in front all the time but get beside your students so that they see you are on their side and wanting them to succeed. 13. Model vulnerability: when you mess up, and you will, own it. Much easier for them to do it if they see it from you. 14. Reframe from "have to" to "get to": everybody has some level of agency in their choice to be in the classroom. Remind everyone of the opportunity and privilege it is to be in a classroom. 15. Trust your students: what if you gave your students the benefit of the doubt and trusted them until they gave you a reason to do otherwise. 16. Offer opportunities for failure and retries: learning happens when we try, fail, reflect, and try again. 17. Embrace friction: learning, like any worthwhile activity, is hard work. Instead of looking for a frictionless experience where we accomplish things without effort, encourage students to dig into the worthwhile challenge of learning something new and growing.

It's Flip-It Friday. Let's turn that bad brainstorm into good ideas. Earlier this week, we explored bad ways to destroy collaboration among students and teachers (because who needs teamwork, right?). But what if we actually wanted to build a culture where students and teachers work together, share ideas, and innovate with AI? Let’s flip those bad ideas into strategies that create meaningful collaboration: 1. Ban group work? No. Make Group Work Intentional and Purposeful. Instead of banning group work, structure collaborative projects explicitly. Apply lesson plans that thoughtfully use generative AI to help students brainstorm, research, and organize their ideas. 2. Email Only? No. Use Tools That Support Seamless Communication. Encourage real-time collaboration with shared documents, discussion boards, etc. Perhaps try asynchronous options so teachers and students can collaborate flexibly. 3. Stay in Your Seat? No. Use Classroom Collaboration to Foster Peer Learning. Use generative AI to personalize learning paths while leveraging heterogeneous grouping to foster peer support, deeper understanding, and inclusive collaboration. 4. Ban Sharing Lesson Plans? No. Build a Culture of Resource Sharing Among Teachers. Create shared resource libraries where teachers can contribute, adapt, and improve lesson plans rather than reinventing the wheel. Co-planning time coupled with generative AI lesson plan support can have a multiplier effect. 5. Limit AI Discussions? No. Encourage Organic AI Discussions. Generative AI in education is moving FAST—waiting for scheduled meetings slows things down. Create informal spaces for AI conversations (Slack? Teams?). It's better when gen AI discussions feel natural, not forced. Your Turn: Which of these strategies could strengthen collaboration in your school? Drop your thoughts below—let’s learn from each other! #FlipItFriday #BadBrainstormMonday #Leadership #GenerativeAI #Schools #DesignThinking

During Learning Labs with educators and scholars in @natomasusd we focused on critical “inquiry moves” that deepen understanding and learning and allow us all to lead, learn and have an inquiry mindset. Collaboration is a huge part of what makes inquiry different, what allows for deeper learning and builds positive relationships and nurtures healthy cultures of learning. 3️⃣ things to remember about collaboration… 1. Get your learners collaborating and sharing thinking at the start of the lesson. A great practice to tune into ideas being shared aloud and to create space that immediately centers your learners 2. Layer collaborative structures. Try a Turn & Talk, a GOGO (Give One, Get One) or opportunity for movement in sharing and a whole group share out that allows for synthesize & reflection 3. Consider your role in collaboration. Partnering up with less confident learners, moving about the space to hear discourse and notice what big ideas and misconceptions emerge and document what’s unfolding (photos, video, notes, etc.) Huge shoutout to Trevor MacKenzie, Mary Rimby and Kristen Martin for making these days so impactful for all learners 💕