Practical Paideia

Lindsey Ralls (Summit Christian Academy)

If you had to pinpoint the main problem that Classical Christian Education solves, what would that problem be? I was thinking about this question over the weekend and if wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. What I realized, is that there are actually several ‘problems’ that CCE attempts to solve, and figuring out which one is the ‘biggest’ (so to speak) is kind of difficult. 

One of the ‘lower-level’ problems I landed on was that students today graduate with an inability to communicate well. Classical Christian schools set out to solve this problem with frequent presentations in the classroom, and courses like Debate, Speech, and Thesis.

During my shadow day last week, I noticed that when given the opportunity to collaborate, the students preferred to work alone. I’ve seen this in my own classes as well. Almost always, when I tell them that they can work together on an activity, I’ll have a few students raise their hands and ask, “can we work alone instead?” When I think through the reasons for this, especially during the middle school years, I’m sure some of it has to do with social anxiety (but my seat-mate is a BOY!!!) and just the general awkwardness that surrounds those middle school grades (I would love to hear your thoughts on how well grammar and rhetoric students handle collaborative activities). Yet, I think there are reasons that reach beyond this too. 

My guess is that students would rather work alone because they can get it done faster, it’s more efficient, and they feel like they don’t need input from anyone else. And, if I’m being honest, I feel this way sometimes too. Yet, I think we would all agree that collaboration is important. Not only does collaborating with one another give us more insight on a topic, it also helps us see something from someone else’s perspective. And finally, going back to the ‘problem’ that I mentioned earlier, collaborating provides us with a chance to communicate well with one another. Yes, it’s easier to tackle it on our own, but that doesn’t mean it’s better.

How then, do we encourage our students to actually collaborate with one another (on the assignment, not on their favorite football team). Below are a few tips I think I will try, but I would love to hear your thoughts as well.

• Keep collaborative time structured by giving each student a role or a task (“Joe you are going to answer the question using X, but Shannon is going to compare your work against this example.”
• Keep collaborative groups small (2-3 people) 
• Make the topic challenging (If the questions are easy then students will want to just do it themselves. By asking challenging questions that require deeper thinking, students will be more apt to embrace working with others.)

Requiring that our students collaborate from time to time will help them become better communicators, while also showing them that ‘efficiency’ isn’t always the priority.