A collaborative project involves students gathering information, organizing it, and presenting it together. It can involve students within a class, across classes/schools, of different ages, or include community members. The key is that students are responsible for the results and must work as a group. When implementing collaborative projects, teachers should consider group dynamics, challenging but not overwhelming students, and assigning roles to distribute work evenly. Examples include having student groups create an educational video about a chemistry element by assigning researcher, writer, and videographer roles.

1. Collaborative Projects
What is a collaborative project?
 Simply put, collaborative projects are
those which allow students to gather
information, organize it, and present it in
cooperation with others.

2. Collaborative Projects
A collaborative project can involve:
 Only the students in the class.
 Students of the same age but in other
classrooms / schools
 Students of other ages in other
classrooms / schools
 People from the community (parents,
professionals, etc.)

3. Collaborative Projects
The important thing is that the students are
responsible for the results of their
project and that they must work together
to achieve it.

4. Collaborative Projects
Some strategies:
 Don't allow one student to dominate the group. Try to
ensure that each group contains a mix of extroverts and
introverts and creative and logical students. As the
students split up the work, they will likely take work that
they feel more comfortable doing.

5. Collaborative Projects
Some strategies:
 Use the project to stretch your students and get them
working outside of their comfort zones. The classroom is a
very safe and sterile environment; perhaps require the
students to interact with the community or nature. Groups
in a history class could be required, for example, to
interview a few World War II veterans. A physics group
could be tasked with setting up a projectile test that uses a
natural law being covered in class. The value here is in the
students learning for themselves how to conduct research
and find a required piece of information.

6. Collaborative Projects
Some strategies:
 Although it's important to challenge your students, don't
push too hard -- you don't want your students to have any
traumatic experiences in your lesson. For example, some
may not emotionally be able to handle an assignment that
entails speaking extensively in front of the class. It is
important to acclimate such students slowly to
embarrassing or frightening situations.

7. Collaborative Projects
Some strategies:
 It may be a good idea to assign roles to the students in
each group, or have them chose roles for themselves.
This is another way to avoid having one overly-ambitious
student do all of the work by his/herself. For example,
each group could contain a researcher, a writer, an
illustrator, etc. The roles should be structured so that as
little work as possible overlaps and it would be difficult for
one student to step outside the bounds of his role.

8. Collaborative Projects
Some examples – For a chemistry class:
 The students will be required to create a short movie
about a certain element and its role in human society,
which can later be uploaded onto YouTube. Students will
be placed into groups of 3 and assigned roles: researcher,
writer, and videographer. All three students will be
expected to contribute to the filming of the movie. To
further prove that each student was acting within the
parameters of his or her role, as part of the project they
should turn in their rough drafts and planning materials.
 The researcher should find the required information which
will then be processed and put into a form appropriate for
an educational video. The writer must work in close
collaboration with the videographer, who will later put
everything together using Windows movie maker or other
comparable software, to ensure that they both have similar
expectations of how the video should turn out.

9. Collaborative Projects
Now it's your turn:
 The song "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel is actually
laid out just like a history lesson. Each line of the song
speaks about the important people or events that
happened in each year. Using the principles that we've
discussed here, take a look at the song lyrics and try to
think of ways that this song could be used as a
collaborative project.