Partners

When working with a partner on an Inquiry, your are expected to collaborate. But what is this? Here’s a lengthy explanation from ITL Research.

Collaboration

Are students required to share responsibility and make substantive decisions with other people? Is their work interdependent?

Overview

In traditional schooling in most countries, students do their own work and receive their own grades. This model does not prepare them well for the workplace, where they are likely to work on teams with others to accomplish tasks that are too complex for individuals to do on their own. In today’s interconnected world of business, real project work often requires collaboration across companies (e.g., a collaboration between a pharmaceutical company and a chemical engineering company to produce a new vaccine) or with people in a different part of the world. This type of working requires strong collaboration skills to work productively on a team and to integrate individual expertise and ideas into a coherent solution.    

This rubric examines whether students are working with others on the learning activity, and the quality of that collaboration.

At higher levels of the rubric students have shared responsibility for their work, and the learning activity is designed in a way that requires students to make substantive decisions together. These features help students learn the important collaboration skills of negotiation, conflict resolution, agreement on what must be done, distribution of tasks, listening to the ideas of others, and integration of ideas into a coherent whole. The strongest learning activities are designed so that student work is interdependent, requiring all students to contribute in order for the team to succeed.

Big Ideas  

Students work together when the activity requires them to work in pairs or groups to:

• discuss an issue

• solve a problem

• create a product

Students work in pairs or groups might also include people from outside the classroom, such as students in other classes or schools, or community members or experts. Students can work together face to face or by using technology to share ideas or resources.

Checklist for effective partner collaboration:

• Have we planned our inquiry together and agreed who is responsible for what?

• Have we spread the workload evenly between us and across the full length of the inquiry?

• Have we recorded in our planning who is responsible for what so that it’s clear to both of us?

• Do we meet regularly to discuss and share what we have done so that we are clear on what the other has done?

• Are we both respecting the partnership by fulfilling our responsibilities to the best of our abilities?

• Are we both being focussed and productive?

• Are we holding each other accountable and accepting feedback on how we are doing from each other?

• Do we meet to share ideas and discuss possible answers to our fertile question?

• Do we ask challenging questions to develop our ideas further?

• Is our work significantly better because we work together?