Everett Community College

Sample Weekly Activities

Week One | Week Two | Week Five | Week Seven | Week Nine

Week One

• Goal: General introduction to Collaborative learning through readings and introduction to the CoLT (collaborative learning technique) called Jigsaw.
• Outcome: The intended outcome of this first weekly activity was to engage participants in the discussion of underlying theory regarding Collaborative learning, engage participants in a CoLT from which we would define some group resources to be used throughout the year.
• Resources:
  • Case for Collaborative Learning 
  • Best Practice Strategies
  • Designing Effective Group Activities 
  • The Jigsaw Grid 
  • Criterias for Effective Group Assignments 

Week Two

• Goal: The goal of week two was to complete the Jigsaw experience by having home groups report out the progress they made toward gathering teaching lab resources. The home groups worked together to create the "resource list" attached here .
  The second goal of week two was to learn about seminaring as a CoLT and practice seminaring around the reading attached here.
• Outcome: The outcome of these two activities is attached.
  • This is the final list (PDF) of resources created by a synthesis of home group recommendations.
  • Below are hand-outs and group reflections regarding the seminar activity.
• Group Assignments and Handouts:
  • Seminar Preparation Paper 
  • "What is a Seminar" by Jim Harnish, North Seattle CC
  • Seminar Assignment 

Week Five

• Goal: Dean McManus, author and Professor Emeritus from the University of Washington, was invited to the lab to introduce his book, leaving the Lectern. His tells the personal story of his decision to rethink his long time lecture mode courses and turn them into collaborative classrooms.
• Outcome: As you can see by the participant responses, this was a fruitful time of sharing with a respected senior professor.

Week Seven

• Goal: The Book Insights on Leadership, Edited by Larry Spears, (see bibliography for more details) was the center of our work this week. The Think/Pair/Share CoLT was used to lead us in discussion on readings from this text.
• Outcome: The end of lab reflections written by participants, attached here, Give you a sense of the outcomes of this lab activity. Personally, and to my surprise, this was one of the most spirited discussions of the year. Lab Assignment Response.

Week Nine

• Goal: Our goal this week was to discuss various methods and thoughts regarding assessing group activities.
• Outcome: The attached files are some of the assessment models we discussed this week. The bibliography and the Collaborative Learning Workbook, both offer many good ideas about the difficult task of assessing group work.
• Group Handout and Resouces:
  • Assessment Tool Package 
  • Assessment Questions 
  • Peer Evaluation 
  • Calculating Peer Evaluations 
  • Rational or Cooperative Exams? 

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