4 minute read
Wanted: Team player
Team player Wanted:
By Daniel Vincent
At some point during their working lives, most of the teenagers we teach today will find themselves working with others towards a common goal. While collaboration itself is nothing new – from the construction of ancient monuments to the moon landings, humans have always worked together to achieve incredible things – its importance in our globalised society is only set to grow. In business, successful projects increasingly require dynamic teamwork not only between individuals with very specialised skills sets but also between people from different cultural backgrounds. In science, progress depends as much on the work of teams of researchers scattered around the world as it does on the global exchange of knowledge. Likewise, in the creative industries everything from TV series to rock concerts are brought to fruition only through the collaborative efforts of teams of individuals, often numbering in the hundreds and thousands, who each bring different strengths and experience to the table. Where then, as ELT teachers, do we come into this?
PRACTICE MAKES PURPOSE
Firstly, successful collaboration calls on a wide range of component skills, including mind-mapping, negotiation, collective decision-making, group planning and giving feedback, which in turn all depend on effective communication. For this reason, the ELT classroom lends itself extremely well to developing our students’ ability to collaborate. After all, we already want them to be talking to one another to improve their language skills. By marrying language practice to collaborative class activities and group project work, we give that practice genuine meaning and purpose. At the same time, when the English being practised is also the language through which students collaborate, listening and speaking become something more than simply two of the four language skills. Students need to listen actively not only to understand the words that are said but also to take on board the other person’s contributions. Speaking involves not simply expressing one’s own ideas but also responding respectfully and constructively to the ideas of others. In this context, turn-taking itself becomes a key collaborative skill. Collaboration requires dialogue in its truest sense, not merely the sense in which we usually understand it as a type of language practice.
IN IT TOGETHER
As well as requiring effective communication, collaboration also harnesses the skills, experience and knowledge of everyone involved, not only in order to come up with better results but also to allow for more creative problem-solving. Think of the thousands of people it takes to design, build and test an aeroplane, from the scientists, engineers and technicians to the project managers and pilots. Every individual has a role to play in ensuring the plane is completed on time and is airworthy. In a similar way, we can encourage our students to pool their skills and take responsibility for their own contributions during collaborative projects by ensuring a mix of strengths when establishing groups, by drawing attention to the fact that students can learn from one another as well as from the teacher, and by giving them the opportunity to assign their own roles. This could entail anything from dividing up the research that goes into preparing a poster or presentation to deciding who will take charge of which scenes in a play they are writing.
COLLABORATION AS THE WAY FORWARD Collaboration is not just a buzzword. As well as its expanding role in the world of work, it is becoming increasingly necessary on a much broader scale. Many of the most serious challenges facing the world today, from how to tackle the climate crisis to how to handle the impending disruption from AI, are far too complex to be dealt with by any single group of people. If these problems are to be overcome, their solutions will need to involve the combined ideas, shared knowledge and collective efforts of individuals, businesses, universities, governments and other institutions around the globe. And at a time when public discourse is often highly polarised, the ability to listen to one another and share ideas in a spirit of mutual respect and open-mindedness is essential if we are to coexist peacefully and work together to build a better future for everyone.
We can help ensure our students do not get left behind in such a world – indeed, that they even thrive within it – not only by building collaboration into our lessons whenever possible but also by approaching it in the same way we would linguistic competence, as something that can be developed step by step over time. This requires us to think of the teacher’s role more holistically, as not just an imparter of subject knowledge but also as a fosterer of key life competencies. This in itself is a challenge, but one it behoves us all to rise to.
Daniel Vincent has taught English for over 15 years in the UK, Japan and Spain, and has experience in materials and course development. He has recently authored a new teens course for Cambridge University Press.
