Collaboration

==**// How will you facilitate an authentic collaborative learning experience to promote deeper student engagement with content skills and concepts? //** To effectively facilitate an authentic collaboration experience it is necessary to ensure the all prerequisite skills are mastered. Before the students begin their PBL assignment they will work in stations as a team. Each station will address prerequisite skills for statistics. Each station will have concrete and abstract statistical problems for each group to solve. This will allow the students to get comfortable with working with their team and it will also make the new content easier to discover because the students will be able to see the mathematical connections. Furthermore, each group will be strategically created to include a high, middle, and lower performing student. ==

==**// As members of collaborative groups, how will you support students’ efforts to identify solutions to the problem you are using as the framework for your PBL instructional unit? //** As students work throughout the PBL they will have to answer a series of word problems that will be aim to help the students think on a higher leverage. Also, each team will be required to justify and defend their solution using a form of multimedia. I will review a rough draft of each team solutions set and provide feedback with what needs to be re-examined. ==

==**// What criteria will you use to assign learners to collaborative groups, including a rationale? //** Before the students begin to work as a team on the PBL-they will work together on stations that cover the prerequisites of the content. After the students complete the station activity they will be given a small assessment on the content. Based on the results, I will pair a high, middle, and low performing student to work together in a group. It is the hope that the lower performing students will be helped by the other two team members. ==

==**// What will be the size of the collaborative groups you will include in your unit? //** Each group will be no three or four students. Depending on the class size it may end up being one group of two. Having a small group will allow students the ability to assign various task and to the opportunity to meet up outside of the classroom. ==

==**// Which digital tools and websites are you considering for collaboration in your unit? //** For Collaboration purposes we will use Skypes to conduct meetings where a plan, strategy, and team Member’s responsibilities will be implemented. Multimedia such as PowerPoint, Google Docs. and youtube.com will be used to post final presentations and solutions. Each team will use some type of polling website such as polleverywhere.com to collect data from their peers, family, or teachers. The team will also create a wiki workspace to collaborate throughout the project. ==

==**// How will you assess participation of the students in their collaborative groups? //** At the conclusion of the activity each student will complete a Google form survey created by the teacher to evaluate each of their team members. After the student takes the survey the teacher will briefly meet with the team and have a discussion with each member individually to see if they are able to ascertain what the solution to the problem was and the strategies that their team used. ==