Reflection - What does "helping" a classmate really mean?

Collaboration requires students working in groups. As I mentioned before students need guidance and instruction in how to work together. Another facet of working together is helping a group member or classmate learn. Teachers often tell students to ask 3 classmates for help before they come to them or they tell one student to help another. In my experience "helping" usually means "telling the answer" to another student. I've had students tell other students or even their teacher that I wouldn't help them because I didn't just tell them an answer. This same concern was addressed in an article on collaborative inquiry that I read for my chapter. The author reminded the reader that students must understand that "telling an answer" or "doing someone's work" is not helping a classmate learn. The author explains that helping means learning to ask the right question so that the other person grasps the meaning or explaining with an example. This is accomplished by the teacher actively and clearly explaining, demonstrating and developing these understandings. I think a teacher needs to model this constantly, even if a student just wants to know what a word means. The student can be questioned about the sentence the word is in, reminded to use context clues, or the teacher can use the word in another sentence. I love to see the smile on a student's face when I say, "See, you did it!'