With the new school year underway, educators agree collaborative learning environments are where students thrive. The COVID-19 pandemic challenged the world in countless ways and rocked the foundation of education, significantly reshaping learning. The pandemic taught educators that social discourse and collaboration are critical to the cognitive function of students of all ages and crucial to schooling in a post-COVID society.
A technology-enriched collaborative environment can encompass a variety of educational approaches.
Programs using various digital tools involving a joint effort by students, teachers and families are considered technology enriched. The digital interactive, interdisciplinary formats often employed during lockdown learning are now commonplace in classrooms everywhere.
An advanced educational specialist degree can prepare education professionals to promote better student learning outcomes through collaboration, teamwork and partnerships.
Collaboration Promotes Teamwork
In-person, technology-enriched collaborative environments usually involve students searching for understanding and solutions, working in groups of two or more and creating something together. The lockdowns of COVID-19 emphasized the need for human connections, and rigorous evidence has shown that students are more likely to succeed when schools and families have stable, active and robust relationships.
Rebecca Winthrop, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, says students are more likely to stay in school, graduate and excel academically and socially if they have support at home. This only emphasizes the need for strong relationships between educators and families.
We are emerging from remote learning with new expectations for schooling. Memorizing facts and regurgitating the information on a test has been the norm in education for years, but educators agree that it doesn’t encourage retention as collaboration does. Unfortunately, most teachers did not spend adequate time instructing students to use teamwork to solve problems before the pandemic.
Schools looking to create technology-enriched collaborative classrooms must encourage collaboration, listen to the concerns of families and set mutually beneficial goals.
Creating Partnerships
There are myriad benefits to technology-enriched collaborative learning. Collaboration promotes
cultural awareness and responsiveness, social-emotional learning, student inquiry and self-selected differentiation. A significant advantage of technology in the classroom is the teacher’s ability to provide students with quick and even live feedback, helping them move toward more self-regulation. Technology-based feedback and collaboration tools not only benefit students but also lessen the load on teachers.
Collaboration fosters classroom teamwork and brings student voices together in a shared community dialogue. The pandemic may have propelled the digitizing of teaching; it also shined a light on how socio-emotional interactions impact learning. In a collaborative setup, learning happens through specific activities. Some activities — like reading, thinking and predicting — can be performed individually, while others — like questioning, explaining and arguing — can only occur with peers. Experts say these activities trigger unique cognitive mechanisms that only happen in collaborative learning.
Teachers looking to foster collaboration in the classroom will communicate, provide feedback, play to an individual’s strengths and recognize achievements. Integrated knowledge from studying classroom culture and school environments in the digital age can be valuable to educators looking to make a difference.
Evaluating What We Know
Students develop technological and digital literacy skills in the computer-enriched collaborative classroom, which can ease the transitions between remote, hybrid and in-person learning environments. Educators who want to support students’ academic, social and emotional health in the post-COVID era must expand their skill sets to bring to the collaborative classroom.
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Learn more about Northwest Missouri State University’s online Education Specialist – Generalist program.
