How can we support and instruct students in effective collaboration techniques when learning remotely? At face value, collaboration would appear to be a skill that is not easily taught while students are remote. However, it is clearly a communication style that is occurring regularly in the remote work world of today. As my colleagues and I learned during the course of 2020, it can be done effectively at school with a bit of tweaking and scaffolding. 

One of the competencies that is scaffolded into many aspects of my sixth-grade Humanities classes at Princeton Day School is collaboration. Over the past five years, my colleagues and I have made deliberate efforts to teach about collaboration and to provide students feedback as they develop this important skill. However, when we were thrown into remote teaching in the spring of 2020, we were faced with a challenge. We had to be creative and build in deliberate strategies for online collaboration. 

When PDS began our remote teaching program, Panthers Online, in the spring of 2020, we were completely asynchronous. Concerns about equity issues and student ability to get online meant that we did not require students to be online for classes. This posed…