Collaboration and Communication

 

At a recent professional development meeting at our school, we talked about the importance of collaboration and communication among students.  It was one of those PD sessions that prompted me to think more after the meeting, and I began to realize why collaboration and communication are not just important but vital to students and what the prerequisites are for them to work well.

Christians know that God is eternally existent in three persons.  He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit...three persons, one God.  It is one of the delightful mysteries of our faith.  This truth reveals, as has often been said, that community is at the heart of God, and since we were created in His image, it stands to reason that collaboration, a word whose Latin roots literally mean "to work together," should be part of our nature.  We were created for collaboration with God Himself and with others.

We also should expect to be highly communicative creatures, for, as we read in the first chapter of Genesis, God spoke reality into existence, and in the first chapter of the Gospel of John, we read, "In the beginning was the word."  Think about it.  The God in Whose image we are made spoke, and subatomic particles began to exist.  He uttered a word and the number 17 came into being, to say nothing of planets and rabbits and gravity and us.  Our God is a supremely communicative being, and as creatures made in His image, so are we.

Collaboration and communication, while natural to humans, must also be developed, just as our abilities to run and jump, paint and do math, and all other things must be, and just as we would no more expect a person who had never touched a football to show up for practice and run a complex offense, so we should not expect to shape high school students into master collaborators and communicators without some foundation having been laid.

When it comes to collaboration, docility is a key requirement.  Unfortunately, too many people think docility refers to a nearly catatonic state.  Again, the Latin root helps us here by showing that docility simply means the quality of being able to be taught, and folded into that quality are the abilities to respect others, to listen, and to exhibit self control.  Students who lack these abilities cannot suddenly be turned loose to work in small groups, at least not unless the teacher is looking for chaos to ensue.  Ideally, these abilities will have been nurtured by families and by earlier levels of schooling.  If they are present, then the high school teacher can build on them, helping students grow in their natural calling to collaboration.  If not, then these prerequisites must be established.

As for communication, there is no better preparation for the mature development of all this entails than early childhood reading.  A quick Google search will produce more evidence for this than you can possibly process, so a good place to start may be the work of Maryanne Wolf, a child literacy expert with a background in cognitive science and psycholinguistics.  Children who have experienced books, both by having them read to them from an early age and by reading on their own, not only gain linguistic fluency that helps them with the massively complex tasks of mature written, read, and oral communication, but they also gain exposure to and awareness of a vastly broader world of ideas and emotions and experiences than they could have simply through their direct, physical relationships.  Seeing how characters respond to situations, both good and bad, in stories, develops in them a rich palette from which to draw in their own responses to the world.

As a Christian who is an educator, I want to help my students become who God has called them to be, and this clearly involves helping them develop their skills in collaboration and communication.  I invite all those who work with younger children, especially parents and other family members, to help prepare their children for the levels of mature development that will come as they grow older.