If you walk into a collaborative classroom, you will see: respect, curiousity, and students interacting positively with one another, and students expressing their ideas without the fear of judgement.

It takes time to develop this type of learnig environment. Students need to build relationships with one another as the teacher demonstrates these characteristics as she develops her own relationships.

To create a collaborative classroom, the teacher must be a role model for:
1. Respect - make all students feel that their opinion is valued.
2. Open minded - demonstrate that everyone is accepted and can feel comfortable in sharing their opinion.
3. Diversity- Point out special qualities that students might have and these unique qualities can often add to learning.

Four parts of collaboration:
1. Identify
2.

One of my favorite resources to build collaboration is the book Building Thinking Classrooms by Peter Liljedahl. It teaches how to create a culture of learning that allows all students to have a voice as well as transforming traditional teacher facilitated instruction into student facilitated instruction.