Collaboration in School and Society

"Teaching young learners how to work with others within a community on social issues can improve students’ commitment to civic participation." This quote from the Pearson Collaboration article resonated with me primarily due to its connection with my content area. Social Studies is about more than just learning who certain historical figures are and what they did. It's about learning and using certain things from those people to better the society you are a part of. A person cannot go their whole life doing things solo. At some point they will have to communicate with others, collaborate on a project for work, or come together with their community to make changes. To not teach these techniques to our students is doing them a great disservice. Even doing small things such as splitting the class up and assigning them different roles in the group can help form these techniques. In regards to Civics, one can start an activity by having multiple groups form of someone playing a community role. At this stage, the students can bounce ideas off of each other because they are all playing the same role. After they have been at this stage for some time, the groups can be split up and the different roles come together in other separate groups to form their own small committee. This teaches the importance of the roles that they played and also teaches them how to look for good candidates of those roles, or even be those candidate themselves.