Introduction
Working together to solve problems and create new things is a vital part of life, so it makes sense to practice it in school. Ideally, we’ll have students work together frequently, because the skills needed to make collaboration work well take a lot of practice.
One challenge teachers face in creating these opportunities is thinking up ideas for good projects. The ideas presented here are for teacher-tested projects that went well and got students actually collaborating, not just dividing up the work.
Each can be customized for your content area and could be done as independent projects, but they happen to lend themselves well to groups, because each one naturally would be improved with contributions from more than one person.
Gonzalez, Jennifer. "5 Fantasic Ideas for Collaborative Projects." Cult of Pedagogy, 13, Aug. 2022, https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/ collaboration-projects/
Idea #1 - A Guide
Students create a guide that helps someone navigate a situation, environment, or process. Putting this guide together requires students to decide exactly what information to include, what to leave out, and how much detail to offer. Students could create a guide to getting started in a particular hobby, a guide to completing a process or task, or a guide to succeeding in a school, class, or other defined space.
EXAMPLE: VOTER’S GUIDE
Barry Frank, a Master Teacher in Flushing, Queens, NY, had his 12th-grade humanities students create a voter’s guide for an upcoming local election. Students researched local politicians who were up for election, who they were running against, and their platforms. “As journalists,” the project summary says, “students are responsible for gathering, evaluating, and verifying information along the way.” You can view a sample of student work here.
The Tech: “We used Spinndle as our co-learning space where students posted work at various checkpoints to the class feed,” Frank says. “They engaged in peer critique, iteration, and worked through problems through the platform. They also used Spinndle for project management, kind of like a Kanban. Instead of their work living in Google Drive silos, Spinndle offered a public collaboration space to work through the project. They also used the self-report feature to self-assess and reflect on their learning.”
Idea #2 - A Local Research Project
Students research something about the history, science, government, or some other aspect of their local community, with in-person visits and interviews as a key component of their research. Topics could include things like drinking water quality, specific court cases, the impact of certain industries arriving in or leaving an area, how certain landmarks got their names, flora and fauna native to the area, or the history of immigration to the region.
EXAMPLE: LISTENING TO THE BUDDHISTS IN OUR BACKYARD
Under the supervision of their teacher Andy Housiaux and visiting teacher/author Chenxing Han, six high school students at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, spent ten weeks immersed in the study of Buddhism in their local communities. Within 15 miles of their town there are 11 Buddhist temples: Cambodian, Lao, Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese. Students visited these temples, used thinking routines from Harvard’s Project Zero, and learned to ask questions and do research in this immersive environment. After a week of these temple visits, students spent the remainder of their term researching themes that had emerged in their visits: the culture of mutual generosity between monastics and laypeople, cultural preservation and transmission in Asian American temple communities, and youth education. “We sought to map and better understand the tremendous diversity of Buddhism in America today,” Housiaux explained, “and to turn our attention toward often-overlooked Asian American communities (as opposed to a more typical focus on white convert communities in mainstream depictions of Buddhism).”
The team’s work is documented on this website.
The Tech: “Students used Slack for daily check-ins with each other and as a way to communicate during the day and over the duration of the project,” writes Housiaux. “Task management, delegation, and organizational matters were handled on Slack, which we used instead of an LMS. The students also used Google docs/slides/etc collaboratively, both in the research and writing process and when they were planning their final presentation. The final presentation was a public demonstration of learning over Zoom to 70 high school teachers, academics (a number of whom wrote books/articles that we had consulted over the term), members of our alumni community, and others interested in Buddhist education.”
Idea #3 - A Tour
Students create and present an in-person, video-based, or virtual tour of a place. The term “place” can be broadly defined to include physical spaces near or far, virtual spaces, or even imaginary spaces, and can include commentary by the creators in writing, video, or audio format.
EXAMPLE: VIRTUAL SCHOOL TOUR
A group of sixth grade students in Rebecca Comninaki’s Innovations class (an elective) in Lynchburg, VA, had experienced how scary it was to attend a new middle school having never seen it — they hadn’t been able to tour the new school in person when they started. So they created this virtual tour of the school for future students. “They had hiccups in the beginning,” Comninaki says, “where they figured out which group members preferred to work on the tour, which students preferred to take pictures, and which of their original ideas needed to be reconsidered.” But they truly collaborated, and did so independently. “I cannot say enough about how little I did and how these students collaborated and worked during class, on weekends, and after school to get pictures of empty halls — all without me ever asking,”
The Tech: Although students didn’t use a collaboration platform for this project, they used a camera and app from GoPro to capture images of the school, then used ThingLink to put the tour together and make it accessible to viewers. The finished tour was shared as a VR goggle tour with incoming 5th grade classes in the spring to get students excited about middle school.
Idea #4 - A Curated Collection
Here, students carefully select items that have something in common, then share them with a defined audience. This might look like a physical or virtual museum exhibit, a top ten list presented as a video, a list of the most, best, or worst of something, or a collection of stories, photos, or artifacts that represent some central idea. (For a few more suggestions, check out this list of curation project ideas.)
EXAMPLE: RETROSPECTIVE VIDEO
Students in Marisa Thompson’s high school ELA class in California were tasked with creating a Year in Review video that showcased a selection of key moments in the past year built around a theme chosen by the student. In 2019, her students decided to work together on creating a Decade in Review video.
The Tech: Thompson allowed students to use whatever programs they knew to put the videos together.
Idea #5 - A Solution
Students work together to develop a solution to a problem. The solution can be a physical product, a digital product, a prototype of some kind, or even an imagined or proposed item, plan, or system that solves a problem.
EXAMPLE: APP DEVELOPMENT
High school students in Geoff Schmit’s software engineering class in Naperville, IL, had a whole semester to design their own app. This came after students completed AP Computer Science and an additional semester covering topics like engineering process and technology ethics. Schmit describes the process he used to structure the project in this blog post. One of the student-created apps that came out of this process is the Merry Tutor, a platform that matches volunteer tutors with students who need tutoring.
The Tech: Students used both Trello and Slack to manage their projects, but Schmit said Trello was the more critical of the two for the work. An example Trello board for the project can be viewed here.
Making It All Work
- Any kind of collaboration can be full of potential pitfalls. Our tips for solving common cooperative learning problems can help.
- Marisa Thompson (who shared the retrospective video idea) wrote an article that offers tips from students on designing collaborative activities that work.
- PBLWorks has a great set of free collaboration rubrics that outline specific skills and standards that can guide you when teaching collaborative skills and giving students feedback on their work.