Collaborative Learning and Classroom Feng Shui
Rick Shur
Education and Language Acquisition Department
LaGuardia Community College/CUNY
The goal of teaching is student learning. Learning is generally maximized when students are
comfortable and having fun. Some people call this “engagement.” A lot of us believe that
students can be maximally “engaged” when they are collaborating and working together. After
all, one of the reasons students go to school is to socialize. If we can tap that urge to socialize
and use it to achieve our goal of learning, then we can consider ourselves successful teachers.
There are many activities that can be done collaboratively in an ESL classroom. Here are a few
that I have found to be enjoyable for my students.
Collaborative Dictation
I either pair up students or put them in teams of three. In either case, the motif is the same. I
choose a student with weaker skills* and designate him or her as “secretary.” The other student
or students are “advisors.” The advisors are students who are stronger in spelling, handwriting
and grammar than the secretary. The secretary is the only student allowed to write. The advisors
may speak, point, open a book, but they may not write (or even hold a writing utensil in their
hand). As I give the dictation, the secretary writes the sentences as the advisors give opinions and
guidance. The seating is always side by side. If it is a team of three, the secretary sits in the
middle, with an advisor on the left and on the right. The secretary hands in the dictation, and all
members of the pair or team get the same grade.
*I always do a dictation, grammar fill-in diagnostic test, and one-hour writing sample on the first day in order to
assess the skills of my students. I put the scores on their index information cards, about which there is a separate
paper in the Administrative section of my handouts. These cards make it easy for me to create pairs and teams.
Collaborative Grammar
This is the same activity as a dictation except that I am out of the picture. It can be any kind of
exercise—fill in, transformation, selection. There is still a secretary and advisor or advisors. If it
is something that has right or wrong answers (as opposed to something that needs my correction
or editing), then secretaries can exchange papers and we can go over the answers together as a
class so that I will not have to do the correcting. This becomes a competition, and the scores of
each pair or team can be written on the board. Students generally enjoy competition, but it’s
important to have fairly balanced teams. If teams and pairs are not fairly balanced, then the
grades should not be announced as part of a competition, but they can still be entered into the
grade book. No student suffers with a collaborative grade because it represents the best of their
composite abilities.
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Collaborative Writing
Again, there is a secretary and advisor or advisors, but the task is to create something, like a
paragraph (all teams start with the same topic sentence that they have to amplify with details and
examples) or a short story that has a beginning but no conclusion, or a guided essay with
introductory sentences for each paragraph but no bodies. Once completed, one of the advisors
reads the team’s writing to the rest of the class so that students can hear each other’s approaches
to the task.
Games
A lot of learning can be done in a game format. Students enjoy spelling bees, and they are a good
way to deal early with spelling demons (especially gh and th words, ing forms, words with
double or single letters that get confused), and other factual contests can be held in the form of a
spelling bee. One task can be to give the irregular past tense of an irregular verb (by spelling it),
or to give the past and past participle of an irregular verb. In spelling bees, students who answer
incorrectly or not fast enough are told to sit down. The object is to remain standing.
Games can be played in pairs, triplets or quartets. A pile of cards can be created by a team,
containing any words that need to be learned. For example, an irregular verb can be on one side
of the card and the past and past participle on the opposite side. Students take turns guessing the
past and past participles and keep any card for which they answer correctly. Incorrect responses
go back into the pile. Eventually, the pile is used up and somebody has the most cards. Other
word lists can include words with their antonyms on the reverse side of a card, country names
and languages, country names and capital cities, singular nouns and their plural forms, and, if
you want to get creative, cards with pictures on one side and the words on the reverse. This kind
of activity, which gets students to create their own materials, has many advantages. First, you
can keep the product for future use. Second, students can socialize a lot talking about pictures
that they want to cut out of magazines or print off of the internet to create vocabulary lessons for
themselves. Categories that are always useful include fruits, vegetables, appliances, rooms of the
house, furniture, clothing, parts of the body, well known places, objects seen outdoors, and
animals.
Class Feng Shui
The only way to have a class conversation is to put the chairs in a circle. It has to be a real circle,
too, not an oval or half circle. The feng shui is extremely important, and I am never shy about
demanding that the students make the most beautiful circle they possibly can. Why? Because the
more perfect the circle, the more equal the participants. In a class conversation, you want
everyone to feel equal. That is how the United Nations works, and that is how a classroom
should work. It is often difficult to decide if I want to have a serious class discussion enough to
make everybody get up and rearrange the room, but one thing I have learned over the years is
that there is no point in having one if the seats are in a grid. You can do short, businesslike
discussions in a grid, like deciding when the students want to do a project, or if they want to
postpone some homework from weekdays to the weekend, but I strongly recommend against
talking about anything personal, social or emotional in any grid setting. Grids are for conducting
business, like passing papers, taking tests, or listening to a lecture.
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