Daniel has taught English for over fifteen years in the UK, Japan and Spain, and has experience in materials and course development. He currently works as a teacher and coordinator for the British Council in Madrid, and authoring a new teens course for Cambridge University Press.
As an English language teacher, you’re probably no stranger to getting your students to work together. Pair work and group work have long been part of our professional repertoire. Now, however, more than ever, collaborative project work, especially with young learners, is taking centre stage. In this series of four blog posts, we’re going to look at the benefits of collaborative project work for teens and teachers alike, as well as how to set up and run successful projects and how to avoid their potential pitfalls. On the way, we’ll take in lots of examples for you to use with your own students.
First, then, the benefits. ‘Why’, you might well ask, ‘should I get my students to collaborate?’ Put simply, collaboration is a key 21st century competency, as identified in the Cambridge Framework for Life Competencies. In both further education and the world of work, there’s an ever-growing need to respect the views of others, find creative solutions to shared problems, work together effectively and resolve conflicts fairly. Our students’ education has to prepare them for this world, and as language teachers we are in an ideal position to foster the skills they need to be successful in it. Not only does collaboration require effective communication between pairs and groups of individuals, making it an excellent way to practise English in a real-world, communicative way, it has numerous wider benefits as well.
Tower building
Let’s take as an example a favourite project of mine; one that is truly collaborative and which works well with teens – tower building. In this project, students compete in teams of three or four to build a tower from a set of basic materials, such as card, string, sticky tape, old toilet rolls, scissors, glue, pens and so on. Each team gets exactly the same set of materials, and the task – or rather the challenge – is to build the tallest tower possible that will support a particular weight. In the past I’ve used small half-kilo rings from a home dumbbell set (which, incidentally, have seen more action in my classroom than they ever have at home!), but a ball or a book will do. I’ve been surprised at how well some teams have risen to this challenge, and also at how quickly some towers have fallen!
Suggested plan for a 60-minute class
Stage 1 Introduction (10 mins) The teacher introduces the project, shows photos of previous towers if available, and inputs any language they feel necessary (there will be more about how to set up projects in the next post in this series).
Stage 2 Planning (10 mins) Students plan their towers. No building is allowed during this time.
Stage 3 Building (30 mins) Students measure, cut, stick, glue, tie, fold, decorate and build! (The longer available for this stage, however, the better, as the towers can take a long time to construct.)
Stage 4 Presentation (5 mins) Students present their towers (preferably to another teacher, if available), explaining their designs.
Stage 5 Testing (5 mins) This is the crunch moment (quite literally, for some teams, if their towers fail to support the weight!). The winning tower is the tallest one to support the weight.
If the group is monolingual, you can help ensure they stick to English by penalising them whenever they lapse into their first language, the penalty being that they have to down tools for two minutes and thus lose valuable building time. We’ll look at other potential problems with project work – and how to overcome them – in the third blog post of this series.
Successful collaboration
Tower building, as well as being lots of fun and generating lots of language, is a good example of how a project can stimulate the key elements of successful collaboration. First of all, it promotes autonomy, with the teacher acting as a facilitator while students themselves take the lead. Secondly, students have to plan together and plan well. This means they have to listen respectfully and respond constructively to one another. It also requires them to decide and assign tasks – each one in charge of a separate section of the tower, for example, or operating a kind of conveyor belt system to build the various pieces. With larger teams, you can even encourage them to negotiate who will coordinate the other members, although each student must still take personal responsibility for his or her own contributions; in order to succeed, everyone has to take part and anyone failing to pull their weight or else trying to dominate will inevitably hold the project back. Finally, as in real-world collaboration, the project has a clear and achievable objective to which the students must work.
I encourage you to try tower-building with your own students (although be prepared for some clearing up afterwards!). In the next post in this series, we’ll look in more detail at how you can set up and run projects to ensure students get the most out of them, not only in terms of developing their language skills, but in terms of learning to collaborate as well. See you then!