Collaboration often yields great results

When I returned to college back in 2017 to pursue my studies in elementary education, there was one aspect of college that really stood out from my perspective. It involved the number of times when my fellow classmates and I dedicated time to help one another in addition to working together to complete a myriad of assignments we turned in each semester.

This perspective took foot as I started the first of two English composition classes held at the Boise State University annex at Mountain Home Air Force Base. I dedicated my 32 years of journalistic writing to review the various papers others in the class started to create as a way to give them an “extra set of eyes” to catch typos and punctuation errors.

In addition, I provided my peers with what my one professor referred to as “kind, helpful and specific” feedback to help strengthen what others in our classroom wrote. To a point, it was my way to repay a debt I owed to my Air Force supervisor during my time at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska.

When I first started work at the base’s weekly newspaper, Donna knew I struggled as a novice news reporter. From my perspective, I would start writing something before my mind hit the proverbial “roadblock” that kept me from taking that writing and turning it into something I hoped would grab people’s attention.

For several months, Donna provided me the guidance I needed regarding every news, feature and sports story I wrote before something unexpected happened. Instead of struggling with everything I wrote, my journalistic writing skills had improved to the point where I took the draft version of each story and strengthened every sentence and paragraph before I let her look things over before they went to press.

It was Donna’s mentorship I sought to provide others in each of my college classes. Among them was one airman at the local Air Force base who admitted he struggled trying to write.

To a point, his struggles reminded me of the same hurdles I struggled to overcome before Donna stepped in and served as my mentor. As we worked our way through two English composition classes that semester, he always took time to thank me for being that extra set of eyes that helped him complete those assignments without worrying about making serious spelling, grammatical and punctuation errors that would’ve cost him the good grades he sought to earn.

Over the next three years, it became clear that the other college classes I took also prompted all of us to work together to tackle a myriad of group projects. That need to collaborate both during and after class took a special note due to the fact most of us didn’t live anywhere near the Boise State campus.

However, thanks to today’s technology, we’d dedicate many hours of our time after class to collaborate through the use of “shared” documents one of us would create before the rest of us stepped in to help complete and provide that work some additional “polish” to make them really stand out. That teamwork was something that helped us see things from our unique perspectives and to complete assignments that gained plenty of positive feedback from our college professors.

Meanwhile, each of us often took time to work with others who struggled with the various academic subjects we needed to complete as we pursued our academic majors. I still remember the probability and statistics class that, from my perspective, was very eye opening but was something I could tackle without a lot of problems.

The same wasn’t true with the one classmate who sat near me. Many times, I saw signs he couldn’t understand what our professor taught.

Seeing this, I tended to take what I wrote in my notebook and rotated it around so he could see what I wrote. Without saying a word, I simply pointed out the steps to correctly answer certain problems, which gave him the catalyst he needed to correctly finish his work.

Having spent time as a substitute teacher in classrooms in the Mountain Home area over the past couple of years, I saw how struggling learners turned to others for the help they needed to overcome those mental roadblocks.

However, just recently, I saw an example of how collaboration doesn’t need to remain restricted to students in one classroom at one grade level. It involves a group project that began as students at Stephensen Elementary School at Mountain Home Air Force Base drew pictures of someone, either real or imaginary, who they saw as their friend.

Those hand-drawn illustrations then reached the students in Brenda Raub’s advanced art class. Each of those students then took time to create another person to go with the friends their younger counterparts created.

Then it took off in a direction I never saw coming. Those collections of drawings then arrived at the high school’s creative writing class in which these students used those drawings as a reference to create poems or short stories regarding the friends they saw in each of those creations.

That collaborative spirit then reached its final step as all of those stories and pictures arrived at the high school’s business technology classroom and became part of published books that featured these stories and drawings about friendship. I can only imagine how delighted each of these students, especially the younger ones, became when they saw their work in something they would enjoy and share with others.

I believe this left a lasting message I seriously doubt these students will ever forget. It provided them a clear example of how they can help one another, regardless of their age.

– Brian S. Orban