Teaching and Learning 21st-Century Skills : Collaboration and Communication in Formal and Informal Educational Settings

This book coalesces research conducted internationally that demonstrates how students benefit from interacting with others. It also showcases how different technological advances, including digitized tools, hybrid presentations, and technological platforms enable synchronous and asynchronous communications that help students to co-construct knowledge and understandings to learn. It brings together leading international researchers to profile new pedagogical developments in academic talk and how these practices have been implemented in different learning environments. The various chapters capture the complementarity of the key twenty-first century skills of collaboration and communication, including how knowledge is co-constructed through questions and feedback that encourage students to think more deeply and critically as they engage in complex problem-solving tasks. This book discusses the different linguistic and digitization tools, including artificial intelligence (AI), used to promote collaboration and communication in the context of teacher-student and student-student discussions in different educational settings, and how these ways of working challenge thinking and problem-solving to promote learning. It also highlights how innovative and creative ideas emerge during collaborative synchronous and asynchronous interactions, and the contributions these discussions make to students’ reasoning, problem-solving and learning. Finally, this book presents specific examples of strategies teachers can use to promote collaboration and enhance communication.