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Published 2023 Revised 2024
Working Collaboratively is part of our Developing Mathematical Mindsets Primary and Secondary collections.
This page for teachers accompanies the Primary and Secondary Being Collaborative resources.
You may wish to watch the recording of the webinar, which draws on the resources below to discuss how teachers can support students to work collaboratively.
"The real satisfaction from mathematics is in learning from others and sharing with others. All of us have clear understanding of a few things and murky concepts of many more." Bill Thurston
If we want to create an environment in our classrooms in which our students feel like they belong to a community of mathematicians, we will need to offer them opportunities to collaborate. We want our students to experience the benefits of collaboration - becoming more resilient and less dependent on the teacher, and becoming confident that they can often achieve more by working together.
If students are to work and learn together; share ideas and support each other, then we may need to think about the following:
Values and ethos
Students can feel anxious about making mistakes or admitting that they are struggling, so it is important that our classrooms provide an environment in which students trust each other, and feel safe to contribute.
Structural considerations
Facilitating productive interactions
You can find problems that are ideal for students to work on collaboratively in our Primary and Secondary Being Collaborative collections. The teachers' resources highlight how students might collaborate as they work on all these tasks.
You may be interested in this collection of follow-up resources:
Peter Liljedahl's book Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, in particular Practice 2 (How we form collaborative groups in a thinking classroom), Practice 3 (Where students work in a thinking classroom) and Practice 4 (How we arrange the furniture in a thinking classroom)
Podcast and transcript of Dylan Wiliam discussing effective questioning in the classroom - the conversation includes reference to a 'no hands up' approach and creating a community of learners
In their article Models for Teaching Mathematics Revisited, published in Mathematics Teaching in 2019, Andrew Blair and Helen Hindle offer a fresh perspective on Alan Wigley's original 'Challenging model' article, originally published in 1992
Collaborative learning in mathematics : a challenge to our beliefs and practices by Malcolm Swan
This article, written by Jennifer Piggott, describes attributes of effective team work and links to 'Team Building' problems that can be used to develop learners' team working skills
This selection of group-worthy tasks have Teachers' Resources which outline how teachers can put into practice a Complex Instruction approach in their classrooms
The NESTA-funded report Solved! Making the case for collaborative problem-solving