Building capability in understanding

I currently teach in an ITE (initial teacher education programme) and have been interested to read students' posts to questions about experiences of online collaboration. Before this task was set however, I had created an opportunity for all the cohort to experience just that, through turning an OECD pdf (The Nature of Learning) into a GDoc, making a comment about the task, making multiple copies of this doc, then sharing each copy specifically with the email addresses of about 10 of the cohort. We ended up with about 15 groups. They had to choose three starters to precipitate a comment response in side the GDoc about the information contained in the document. The choice of starters were:

I wonder if....
This suggests to me...
This idea is new to me because...
I've seen/experienced/read about something like this when I...
I don't understand.....
I'm not sure this makes sense to me because....
So, [ask a question]....
Does anyone else....

Some students had never done this kind of task before, while others had experienced different kinds of online collaboration they drew on when later discussing their experiences. What I found very interesting in their posts was that many had not recognised this particular shared reading task as a possible experience of collaboration. 

For those who had never done this kind of thing before, it precipitated some moments of wonder as they realised what might be possible. Others worried about missing f2f personal interaction because they missed the body language cues. Some even argued that social interaction is diminished by online work, although this was not accompanied by evidence to show this. 

What I learned from this is that even those who had prior experiences of different types of online collaborations, the conceptions (Yes, I know it's early in the year!) about what constituted collaboration were quite wide. Some saw it as a communication means (a connection/transfer of information view), while others thought that it was about working to achieve a task/project outcome (a pragmatic, task-oriented view). Few explicitly noted that collaboration could also mean building knowledge and thinking together as social constructive activities; ones which Peter Skillen talks of in a blog post. Skillen also refers to Brenda Sherry's post about how what she thinks schools and learning should be about -  fostering deep understanding. 

We hope we are fostering that kind of thinking with our ITE students, through exposing them to ways of learning that perhaps challenge or push their comfort zones a little. 

I particularly liked Sherry's focus when she she poses a challenge of her own, for it resonates strongly with how I try to challenge my learners:

MAYBE WE SHOULD ASKING, “WHAT KIND OF THINKERS DO WE WANT OUR STUDENTS TO BE, RATHER THAN WHAT STUFF DO WE WANT OUR STUDENTS TO KNOW?”

I hope that as the year goes on, my students' conceptions of how knowledge is built, shared, understood and created, is expanded so that they can create a variety of opportunities for their learners to practise. I hope too, that their levels of thinking grow deeper and deeper. After all, if our goal for all learners is deep understanding, then we are in this together!