Collaboration in Early Childhood

Many Hands make Deep Work: Collaboration in Early Childhood

According to Cornell’s Center for Teaching Innovation, collaborative learning is shown to enhance higher-level thinking, communication, and leadership skills. In Early Childhood, collaboration is emphasized through out the school day. Beyond just an expression of kindness or generosity toward others, collaboration builds mental flexibility, empathy, and interpersonal skills. Collaborative learning can occur peer-to-peer, in groups, or among an entire class. Peer learning, or peer instruction, is a type of collaborative learning that leads to students teaching one another as they approach a challenge, discuss a topic, or share their own work. Together, they address misunder standings and clarify misconceptions. This happens when the adults understand that they are not the only teachers in the room! Conflict is a healthy, inevitable part of collaboration. In these cases, teachers facilitate group conversations where students learn to share what’s bothering them, and the group learns to problem-solve together. Children feel a strong sense of agency when decision-making with a group or partner. “Even though they are four their voices are heard,” explains Kelly Flink, Early Childhood Director.

Pre-Nursery

Even two year-olds are able to grow through awareness of their peers and purposeful activities to encourage interaction. At this level, they collaborate by completing shared tasks such as matching and sorting, by taking care of their classroom environment, or by creating group art projects on a shared canvas, for example.

Nursery

Collaborating through role playing is big in Nursery. There is also colla boration when it comes to making decisions about their shared learning environment. Students vote monthly on whether to build a train station, or a hibernation cave, or a lemonade stand, etc. and then work together over time toward the shared vision. They each have a role on behalf of the group at snack time, establishing notions of collective responsibility.

Pre-Kindergarten

Pre-K classrooms often feature sprawling block structures that students expand and accentuate together for weeks. Together they experiment with balance, symmetry, and estimation, math skills that the teacher will prompt them to think about as they work. With increased agency in their decisions, these older children are really rewarded by the magic of accomplishing goals as a group.

Kindergarten

By Kindergarten, collaborative work is part of reading, writing, math, and specials periods. Partner reading is a regular exercise where children are paired to read books to one another. In math, partners are asked to demonstrate ways to depict ten (or any number) with materials of the team’s choosing. In PE a favorite game is “floor is lava” in which kindergarteners have to work together to get the whole team across the gym by only touching dot islands on the floor. If anyone touches the floor, the whole team starts over.

The ultimate collaboration is the Kindergarten play. Working with the entire grade for ten days toward a complex goal calls upon their patience, self-control, appreciation of others’ talents, and balance of when it is time to speak up, and when it is time to listen.

“They learn from mistakes better when collaborating. They use impulse control for the sake of others.” — Kelly Flink