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By: Rachelle Antcliff, Director of Training
Magnify Learning
Columbus, IN
Collaboration is hard. It can be uncomfortable, threatening, stagnant, unappealing, and down right frustrating. The flip side, however, is the magic and beauty that comes from effective collaboration. Serendipitous, synergistic, inspirational, and joyful. While I always want my students to take the leap of faith with me that Project Based Learning requires, I want to protect their emotional safety as I build their capacity to collaborate. I have found that equipping students for collaborative success begins at a personal level: exploration of self.
Opportunities for reflection and introspection allow them to enter collaborative situations with the tools to engage as a team member, articulate their needs, offer and receive feedback, and capitalize on the assets they bring to the situation.
1. Identifying Core Values
I think it’s presumptuous to assume students are aware of who they are and what makes them tick (or get ticked off). For this reason, I love the insight Values Activities offer students as an early way to explore their identities and investigate the values that drive their lives. I’ve used or modified several core values activities I have found online. I also love using a beautiful deck of cards like the Live Your Values Deck.
Essentially Values Activities begin by offering a list of dozens of values, narrowing the list to ten, and ranking values in order of importance. Teaching them to name their values provides a tool for both knowing how and why they come to their work in the way they do.
When students share their values with their team, I coach them to explore how values intersect, compound, or act in conflict. Making space for another perspective is one of the most beautiful gifts we can share with those whose lives we are guiding.
I reinforce the use of their values often as I am modeling how to live them. Throughout the year, I ask students to identify which value they are connecting with or feeling challenged by as we complete a learning activity. I have them use the language of values to begin conversations about conflict. We look at values expressed by historical or literary figures. We also check in with the evolution of our values throughout the year. This can begin as an activity in vocabulary, shift to an exploration in synonyms, ramp up to include lessons in parallelism, and finish with the strong verbs of resume writing. I don’t have to stop teaching content to build capacity in my students. All the while, they revisit and refine, reflect and refocus as the beat goes on.
2. Portrait of a Graduate (Themselves)
With values in hand, I invite them draft A Portrait of Future Me. Creating portraits of ideal graduates is a popular activity for educators, one practiced by schools, districts, as well as at the state level. Certainly, developing portraits has had value to me as I reflect on the kind of teacher I need to be in order to help students become the best versions of themselves. Rather than keeping this information among staff only, I welcome my students to join in the portrait creation. In fact, I think their input, voice, and contribution is essential.
A Portrait of Future Me provides students with an opportunity to determine who they want to become, what assets they want to develop, and what new learnings they want to acquire. Once they define where they are going, goal setting, vetting, and tuning becomes a useful collaboration tool.
In one of my favorite books on collaboration, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni identifies Inattention to Results as the capstone dysfunction. In aligning goals or desired outcomes for the project with other students’ goals and desired outcomes, students start to see how their current experience impacts the trajectory they intend their life to follow. Negotiating the route the group takes through the project initiates a powerful discussion in shared success rather than a frustrating game of tug of war.
Portraits of Future Me activities can look a multitude of ways and can connect to varied and sundry content. I have had students write letters to their future selves outlining their hopes and dreams, sketch caricatures labeled with skills and knowledge, pen poetry, create timelines, and write formal reports. Using their Portriats throughout the year is a wonderful tool for reflection and recalibration.
3. Who Is on Your Board of Directors?
Once my students have looked inward, I ask them to take a peek around so they can start building the kinds of connections that will support their pathway toward their goals and help them stand strong in their values.
To begin thinking about who we want to guide us, we read articles and chapters about being the Average of the Five People You Spend the Most Time With (and the articles that debunk the theory). We read “Chapter Three: Your Social Network” from The Rabbit Effect by Kelli Harding to understand some of the science behind the theory. We share stories of heroes and villains in our lives and explore how we are influenced.
I then invite my students to create a Personal Board of Directors. I like to ask them to include a handful of representatives that could include a mentor, a sage, a problem solver, a compassionate soul, a friend, an accountabilibuddy, a historical, literary or scientific idol, and the like. They write a rationale for including each person, connect the person to their Values and Portrait, and often present their Board to a small group. I have asked them to write letters or email to the Directors asking them to fulfill the role.
As they move in to collaborative situations, sharing their lists and how they decided on their final Board Members is a great story telling tool to build trust and community.
4. Understanding the Feels of Feedback
When students move into collaborative situations, a potentially prickly experience can arise when students start to give and receive feedback. If they haven’t been coached on collaboration, prickly can quickly turn to anguish, alienation, or anxiousness. A culture of welcomed and wanted feedback, on the other hand, can establish a practice of trying, failing, fiddling, fixing. We talk about things like growth mindset and learning from failure. But we must teach and model the ways we attain those habits.
A million years ago, I read a story at a marriage retreat called “The Fig Factor.” A newly married couple has a misunderstanding because they are expressing love solely in their own love language. Once they realize what makes the other feel loved, they can attend to each other’s hearts with more intention. I have shared this story or versions of it with my students as a precursor to talking about the ways we respond to each other. My students don’t mind extrapolating the message in a love story to our growth as collaborators. And we own that the world needs more love anyway. Knowing the language we defer to when interacting with others is step one in understanding the feedback cycle.
The next step is to explore the way they like to receive feedback. I have had students who want direct and intense feedback as well as students who need more gentle and supportive feedback. Knowing and sharing the way we best receive feedback is integral to collaborative success. To unpack our own preferences as well as establish class agreements, we run a Feedback Nightmares protocol. As an extra step to the protocol, we add this information to our resumes, so we remember to share our needs with our groups.
5. Focusing on Student Assets
In one way or another, each of the above activities includes a slice of Focusing on Student Assets. Still, the imperative of Assets is worthy of its own mention. Focusing on Assets in a PBL classroom necessitates adding another layer to our teaching practice. When students come to understand they have a teacher who values who they are and what they bring, they are empowered. When they understand that culture permeates every relationship in the class–including those with their peers–they are emboldened.
Sharing Assets prior to embarking on a collaborative activity helps students in groups articulate and assign roles that engender more efficacy. Knowing the brilliance and talent of each group member creates a unique dynamic for each group.
Again, I have used many Focusing on Assets activities I have found. I love the using the book The Best Part of Me by Wendy Ewald to start conversations about the attributes students value in themselves, their specialties, talents, experiences, background, and ways of being. As students tell their stories, we begin to weave the tapestry of our class. When it’s time to move to a new group, they have a starting point to leverage varied talents and capitalize on the beautiful diversity of their groups.
Each of these explorations prepares my students to show up to collaborative situations more fully and authentically themselves. Collaboration is hard; relationships always are. In developing a common vocabulary and providing safe opportunities to practice, they find success much friendlier.
Rachelle was born in Byron Center, Michigan, but has called Indiana home for some time now. She spent a wonderful twenty-five years teaching English and Social Studies; half of those years were in a wall-to-wall PBL school, CSA New Tech in Columbus, IN. She was also part of the design team that created the school, which she defines as “one of my life's greatest experiences.” Rachelle’s job is to facilitate the connections that make “PBL magic” happen. Her work is focused on connecting schools who sign up for workshops with facilitators and content that can best usher them into the world of PBL. When she’s not making PBL magic happen, she can be found on adventures with her family (food, hiking, snow and water activities). She also co-owns a yoga studio and loves to share mindfulness with students.
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