Using Digital Tools to Foster a Culture of Collaboration

As clichéd as it sounds, it’s hard to read anything at the moment, let alone engage in professional discourse, without a direct reference or allusion to the thing that’s dominated our teaching and learning profession for the better part of 2020.

Maybe learning online is the disruption and instigation of change in education that’s been long sought after; maybe it’s just a fleeting experience that will be forgotten soon enough. I’d argue for the former, but time travel doesn’t exist yet and I’ve still got a lesson to plan for tomorrow.

In my rush to hastily get to the ‘finish line’ of this year, I want to stop and pause. Reflect on a few things that have worked this year. Reflect on what has been an absolute game-changer. And then, of course, reflect on what has completely crashed and burned.

Okay, so that last sentence was a little dramatic, but I’m an absolute sucker for idioms and can’t resist embellishing something that has truly sparked a desire in me to fundamentally alter the way I teach moving forward. Specifically, the way in which I foster a classroom learning culture that develops a passion for self-improvement, self-discovery and peer collaboration.

It's a safe, flipped-learning environment where I’m not the centre of the students’ learning and one where I can safely step back to allow for genuine learning to take place.

Teams within Teams for teams to work together as a team

Ignore the confusing naming convention, Microsoft Teams is an incredibly powerful teaching & learning tool.

At the beginning of this year, we turned on the almighty switch to facilitate classes across the school within Microsoft Teams. We had already trialled Teams over the years and teachers had identified the incredible benefits it provided in promoting communication and transparency in the way we worked. I was therefore keen to build on this, to see how this digital platform could be used in blended-learning classroom environments and to identify the advantages it could provide. This trial was, of course, quickly fast-tracked a few months when the school moved to an off-site learning program seemingly overnight due to COVID-19.

Ah, I did it again. The allusion.

Okay, let me get back to it.

I was keen to embrace Teams in all my classes – especially my Year 12 English class. I set out a plan for how I’d use it slightly differently in each of my classes and established the purpose behind each of the varying differences. I wanted to test a range of applications and pedagogical tools within Teams but I also didn’t want to overwhelm one class and make them feel like they were the ‘guinea pigs’. I also didn’t want to pretend that I was some kind of technology wizard that was conjuring up mystical new ideas with the wave of a whiteboard marker just for the sake of it.

This was all happening months before remote learning, and I found that the students quickly loved using Teams in the classroom because it centralised and unified all of the digital tools we were already familiar with. It’s like Lego - you can build and connect the blocks together, but you can easily take them away if needed without losing any of the scaffold.

OneNote. Sharepoint. Lens. Forms. Whiteboard. Stream. Word. Planner. Excel. PowerPoint.

Bring them all together and you have a big, bewildering Lego smoothie. I jest, but educational technology can have a certain connotation for many students and it's been hard to shake that view.

Microsoft Teams was initially perceived by my students as a distraction or something that discouraged and prevented deep thinking. Students told me that technology in general typically made their classes easier because they “didn’t have to think”, which I found interesting; their view of technology in their various subjects was broadly linked to searching for answers to questions through Google.

With my Year 12 English class, underpinning all of our lessons was our School Assessed Coursework (SAC) and the impending final exam looming over our heads. I knew that Teams had to be being worthy of our time and something that didn't add to the students' crammed cognitive load.

From the very beginning, I wanted to show the students that I’m still learning too and that it’s okay to take risks in how we learn. Modeling success and failure, and then openly talking about it as a class, later proved to be a key part of shifting our classroom culture.

Whenever new pedagogical tools within Teams were introduced, I always outlined the purpose and reasoning behind it. As a class, we would then discuss it: “How could we use this as a class? When would this be beneficial? What are the potential issues or challenges we might have?”

I found that if students took ownership of what we were doing and understood the intrinsic benefits, they were more likely to embrace it and adopt it as part of their own autonomous learning.

And that’s when the culture started to shift.

Promoting peer feedback and collaboration?

“This isn’t my best work, but I’d love your feedback” and other overused statements students say to signify discomfort.

If you’re a teacher, you’re probably oh-so-familiar with the dreaded email at 10pm from a student asking for feedback the day before an assessment.

So, as a Year 12 class, we had discussed early in the year that sending me their work in an email attachment was great – being proactive and asking for feedback is a good thing - but doing so in this way meant they were limited in receiving feedback from only one person – me. We spoke about how doing this discourages us all from working together as a group and instils the idea that only the teacher has all the answers.

Which, believe me, I definitely don’t.

Once students were taught how to identify the important skills behind VCE English and providing peer feedback, I saw that they were then able to give feedback that genuinely was as meaningful, if not sometimes better, than the feedback I was providing. As is often the case with a subject like English, the students would pick up on things that I didn’t notice or would express their feedback in a colloquial way that resonated with their peers.

“Consider being more succinct when embedding quotes to aid in the fluency of your written expression.”

Or

“Mate your quotes are waaaay too long. Make them shorter so it’s easier to read.”

Hand on heart, these are both examples of feedback that was given to one student in March. You can probably guess which feedback strand was the one I wrote. I’ll give you a hint: it’s the super-duper boring one.?

After a few weeks of engaging in peer collaborative feedback within the confines of our physical classroom, I started encouraging my Year 12 students to share their work via Teams outside of school. And they did.

Perhaps it was the trust we had all built or the safe learning environment we had developed, but either way, handwritten essays were being scanned by students using the Lens phone application and uploaded within our class channel with an accompanying sentence asking for feedback.

“This is the worst essay I’ve ever written but can someone please let me know what you think?” one student wrote.

Unprompted, other students then read these essays and wrote feedback on the student’s strengths and areas for improvement.

It initially began with just a few students uploading work each week during after-school hours, but once students saw that others were giving and receiving feedback, more and more students started to join in.

My students started mentioning that reading other essays was helping them with their own writing too - and it showed. There was a level of confidence coming through in their writing and a clarity that was initially lacking. Truly unique analytical ideas were being developed which would challenge me in my own thinking and beliefs.

The alienating experience of VCE student competition and student ranking was slowly dissipating, but there were challenges too.

"I don’t want to be judged by others – just tell me what to write"

Students are frequently told the right answer. They’re told what to do and what to think. It’s something I’ve actively moved away from these last few years in my personal teaching practice - providing fewer explicit resources, if any, to prompt actual thinking. But I think this is why so many students have a strong aversion to English; there’s never a clear right or wrong response and sometimes there are more questions than answers.

As such, in my VCE classes, I rarely share my analytical thoughts or ideas with students before they’ve shared theirs. I don’t want to inhibit their thinking or sway them in a direction where they simply write an essay that repeats all of my own ideas.

But this approach doesn’t work for all students.

I’ve learnt that there’s a level of discomfort and transparency that comes with sharing work with others, especially using a platform like Teams where it’s quick and easy to compare. I know now that even in a classroom environment where the majority do feel comfortable working together and can easily identify the benefits of collaborative learning, some students only feel solace when they send me an email with their work.

They don’t want to collaborate or work with others in the class. They just want to know what I think.

And that’s not such a bad thing, right? It’s better than not asking for feedback at all. It’s better than not doing any writing at all. But it still goes against the fundamental acquisition of true skills and knowledge that will set them up for a world that requires curiosity and resilience, and a future that involves navigating complex and dynamic interpersonal relationships.

I continue to be passionate about mental health and understand the challenges associated with managing anxiety. Students have their own battles they’re navigating, and it probably goes without saying that the students’ wellbeing needs to be factored in when trying to shift a classroom culture. There’s no point in striving for 100% student collaboration if it’s detrimental to an individual’s confidence or creates unnecessary anxiety.

There have been times when a student has chosen to not engage in peer feedback outside of class and I think that's okay. I’ve realised that it’s fine for me to ‘let go’ and fall back on the tried-and-true method of providing one-on-one private feedback.

Knowing the student and knowing what's best for their learning needs is ultimately what’s most important.?

And, whilst peer feedback can be an effective teaching and learning practice, it shouldn't replace the act of a teacher conferring with their students during a lesson.

The misconception of digital literacy

It’s Year 12 – is there really enough time for this?

Through my work in digital learning over the years (and this year especially!), I've learnt that there’s a certain misconception regarding students’ digital literacy skills. So many of these skills need to be explicitly taught that it occasionally feels like a burden for educators. It’s always a tough balance to weigh up the pros and cons of ‘losing’ five minutes during a lesson so students can learn something new, such as listening to and providing verbal feedback in OneNote.

It’s been frustrating to use a digital tool and then find that it wasn’t working correctly on a specific device, or that the student had accessed it through a web browser which provided unforeseen issues. I wish I could say that I’m some kind of tech support specialist, but as with everything, I just attempt to identify the issue and problem solve; which, interestingly, I’ve found doesn’t come naturally to students when it involves technology.

There is, however, a certain unwritten language to navigating and using technology. Maybe it’s because of the hours I spent playing Age of Empires on my PC at the age of 7 that allows me to see the implicit patterns behind technology, or maybe I’m just a big nerd. Either way, there’s a case for stronger digital literacy skill development in schools?but with a framed purpose of how staff and students can use those skills for agile and adaptable purposes.

The misconception that students are experts at using technology for learning is potentially a by-product of the inherent nature of a system that often encourages ‘spoon-feeding’ information to students and a reliance on the teacher for all the answers. But we now have the digital teaching and learning tools available to break-free from this structure and start to shift our students' mindsets, our classroom cultures, and develop lifelong learners – we just need to take that step.

Liam Bassett

Liam Bassett is currently the Director of Digital Learning at Westbourne Grammar School. You can view some of his recent videos here: Liam Bassett | LinkedIn