Routines for Professional Collaboration

Routines for Professional Collaboration

by Robyn Lee-Giuseffi and Linda Palomino

Imagine you are a seventh grade student and you arrive at your favorite class.  You are  greeted warmly by the teacher, you take your seat, and follow the class routine to choose a warm-up question and get ready to share your ideas with your assigned partner.  You use the partner talk structures your teacher has taught you, making sure to make eye contact, take turns, paraphrase, and ask questions. You know that you and your partner have 4 minutes to collaborate before the teacher will call on a non-volunteer. You also know that if you are called on and you don’t know the answer, your teacher will give you more time to talk to your partner and then come back to you. Imagine how it feels. Why is this your favorite class?  The expectations were established and you were able to focus on purposeful interaction and learning within the structure of the opening routine.  You know exactly how to begin so that the time feels purposeful and you were taught skills for each part of the routine.

As this unique school year began, we realized that it was an opportunity to carefully consider what we want for our learning spaces, for both students and teachers.  We realized that by focusing on routines for collaboration we could promote asset-based learning environments that were purposeful, positive, and allowed for equity of voice.  Collaboration has been a buzz word for many years now.  We know we are supposed to collaborate professionally around data, student work, and instructional practices.  However in an informal survey of 60 elementary teachers, a common challenge during grade level meetings was ensuring active engagement and feeling like the time was well spent.  We wondered, does a routine meeting structure foster more active and equitable participation in meetings to allow for improved professional collaboration?  

We turned to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and their Three Signature Practices Playbook and the three signature practices described in the resource: welcoming activities, engaging strategies and optimistic closings.  Since August, we’ve been embedding this simple meeting routine every chance we get, including professional learning sessions, both online and in person, student work analysis sessions, meetings with our induction teacher candidates, even our internal weekly staff meetings.  We appreciate the simplicity of the three practice structure and that this routine can be applied to any setting from a classroom lesson to an all day large group meeting.

The Three Signature Practices Playbook defines a Welcoming Activity as “a brief, interactive experience that brings the voice of every participant into the room”.  We often invite everyone to think of a recent bright spot and either share their bright spot by typing it in the zoom chat or sharing it with their table mates.  It is so simple, takes very little time and gives off big rewards by raising and focusing the energy in the room.  

The next step or signature practice is Engaging Strategies which include “ reflection and processing time, and consist of sequential steps that are facilitated to support learning.”  The two engaging strategies we routinely use are collaborative Google slides workspace for think-write-pair-shares and A-B partners with paraphrasing.  The collaborative Google slides workspace is a tool for making group work transparent and keeping a record for later use.  We’ve found it effective to have our prompt or directions on one slide and then have blank cells on the following slides for individuals or teams to record their ideas.  Often we explicitly provide time for individuals to think and type in their ideas into the designated slides before sharing with a partner.  As an engaging strategy and routine for collaboration, we add paraphrasing to the partner share.  We direct one partner to paraphrase what the other partner shared before sharing their own idea.  Paraphrasing can help ensure common understanding and sets the expectation of actively listening.  To add more predictability to the partner share, we typically assign each person as an “A” or “ B” or give a direction such as the person who woke up the earliest will share first and be paraphrased first by their partner.  

The Signature Practices Playbook describes an Optimistic Closing as a step that “ highlights an individual and shared understanding of the importance of the work, and can provide a sense of accomplishment and support forward-thinking”  As an optimistic closing, we regularly use the prompts “I used to think… now I think….”, “Based on our conversation/ my learning, I am going to…” or  “I appreciated our collaboration today because…..”  Again, sometimes we invite people to type their response in the shared Google collaborative slide or in the zoom chat or to share with their tablemates.  The optimistic closing supports application and also provides important feedback for the facilitator.  

The feedback we’ve gathered from the Optimistic Closings has proven to us that this routine meeting structure of the CASEL Three Signature Practices does support professional collaboration. We are believers! We hope you try it.