Engineering Practice: Work Effectively in Teams

1. Be intentional about grouping students—how can the strengths of all students be used effectively and how can students’ strengths support each other? Set expectations at the start of the year or unit on being a good collaborator and teammate. 2. Scaffold collaboration by assigning roles and responsibilities to each team member or have students self-assign within their groups. 3. Review the provided sentence frames and practice using them with students, giving examples of how you might complete the sentences.

1. Can you tell me about how your brim will shade your head? 2. What brim shapes have you talked about in your group? 3. Great, your brim is working! Can you find other shapes that also shade your head? 4. Have students walk around the classroom to observe other groups’ brim shapes.

It is important to provide students with quiet, individual time to brainstorm, or imagine their ideas. In this lesson, the teacher asked students to come up with four different ideas before she had them plan. The Imagine phase of the Engineering Design Process creates space for youth to think creatively and then have many different ideas to choose from.

The teacher asks one pair, “Do you agree on this plan?” If they did not you could use questions such as, “What parts do you agree on?” or “Can you give some reasons why you disagree with this plan?” Sentence frames, on slides and in engineering notebooks, can be scaffolds for students to initiate productive argumentation skills without a teacher present to facilitate the discussion.