Audience: ESL teachers working with low-intermediate-advanced students

Getting students to work together in class on constructing knowledge and solving problems has proven to be beneficial because it stimulates learner autonomy and turns students into active participants in the learning process (Murphey & Jacobs, 2000). Students learn to trust themselves and their peers, and not rely solely on the teacher as the only source of knowledge. Thus, collaboration is an integral component of active learning. The following activities are classroom tested and aimed at improving student collaboration in class.

1. DOs and DON’Ts

Purpose: to elicit what students already know about a topic or do a review.

Have a topic in mind that you want your students to discuss (e.g., “How to write an essay”).

• Divide students into small groups and give each group a large piece of paper.
• Ask them to create a chart similar to the one shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Writing an essay example

• Ask students to brainstorm ideas about what they should do and should not do when writing an essay, and write their ideas in the chart.
• When all groups are done, have them put the charts on the walls and explain their ideas to classmates. This leads to a good whole-class discussion in which students are themselves the experts.

2. YES – NO Chart

Purpose: to promote self-assessment and peer teaching.

As in the previous activity, students are asked to complete a chart on a specific topic (see Table 2), but the focus is on individual rather than collective knowledge. Students have a great opportunity to receive extra explanations from peers who are knowledgeable about the topic. This activity works well right before a test or other formal assessment.

Table 2. Note-taking methods example

• Ask students to evaluate their understanding of different aspects of the topic.
• Have them create a chart (see Table 2 as an example) and fill it out.
• Ask students to walk around the classroom and find classmates who can explain to them items from their “I’m not sure…” column. Students can organize mini study groups based on the issues they discuss.

3. Jigsaw

Purpose: to stimulate responsibility for independent learning and construct knowledge together.

This activity works great for introducing a new topic that can be broken into several parts. Here are the steps to follow:

• Put students into groups according to the number of “jigsaw pieces” a topic is broken into.
• Each student studies just one piece of information about the topic.
• Next, students get together with students from other groups who studied the same piece of information to discuss it and do a short task to check understanding.
• Then students get back to their original group and explain their piece of information to the other group members so that everyone has at least a general understanding of the entire topic.
• Finally, students complete a group task to check their understanding. The task may be graded to ensure that all group members do their work diligently.

Below are some topics where the Jigsaw activity can be used quite effectively:

Table 3. Jigsaw examples

Conclusion

The activities discussed above will help you improve the collaborative environment in your classroom. Their most important advantage is that they provide “frameworks,” and thus are highly versatile and can be adopted for teaching a variety of topics across all skills. These activities can even be used multiple times with the same class and still feel new due to the variety of topics that can be learned and reviewed with their help.

Reference

Murphey, T., & Jacobs, G. M. (2000). Encouraging critical collaborative autonomy. JALT Journal 22(2), 228–244.

Olena Zastezhko is an IEP instructor at the University of Dayton, where she teaches a variety of ESL classes to pre-academic students and coordinates IEP tutoring.