The Language of Collaboration

In our recent How We Organise Ourselves unit of inquiry we leaned into the concept of collaboration.

We explored what collaboration meant in English and spoke about team work. We listened to the story 'Collaboration Station' by Shannon Olsen and Sandie Sonke and noticed the different ways in which we can work together.

Using the medium of construction I encouraged the children to build collaboratively using materials such as large wooden blocks, Lego, Kapla and magnetic tiles. I observed that while the children wanted to work together they struggled with the oral language needed to join a collaborative group, share their ideas and negotiate.

We took a week to practice sentences we could say for the following situations:

• How to join a group

• How to share your idea

• How to agree to an idea

• How to express your concerns around an idea

We modelled the use of the sentences in role play situations and the children were then able to add these words to their collaborative tool kits.

While many children were able to collaborate using their spoken language skills other children chose to express collaboration in different ways such as drawing out plans, quietly filling a role such as passing the materials to a fellow builder or photographing their structures. The ability of the children to translanguage collaboration in its broadest sense meant that they were able to successfully create an impressive array of structures.

This project was so rich that out of it were born inquiries into organisational languages and power sharing as well as collaboration so look out for more posts focusing on these areas!