Wisconsin Union Blend

T&LS on Union Blend - Notes from the 2008 Teaching and Learning Symposium

Today’s panel session on Facilitating Collaborative and Group Projects wrapped up with a series of quick, two sentence tips from each of the panelists on facilitating collaborative work. Here are my notes on their rapidly delivered good advice:

• be explicit about the role of collaboration in your course
• be ready for your students to be even more diverse than you might think them to be at first
• find creative strategies to maintain independent accountability
• create collaborative exercises that are authentic to the discipline
• collaborative tasks must be challening enough to merit a collaborative effort (in other words, there needs to be a real reason for students to collaborate
• involve students in the development of the strategies, guidelines, and expectations around group work
• collect data from your students on what’s working and what’s not working
• make collaboration a primary and explicit goal of the course
• create the spaces for collaboration to happen - both the tools and the physical space
• assess students, through peer and self evaluation, on their collaborative process
• in addition to teaching students the discipline, train them on collaboration

Being open and direct with students about the goals of group collaboration was an important thread throughout the session. The panelists also stressed the importance of making self and peer assessments of the collaborative process itself an integral part of the project design.

Here are a few other key points from the session that stood out for me:

John Wright, Department of Chemistry, stressed the role student collaboration plays in helping students build the confidence they need to think about problems on their own. Wright explained that when students work collaboratively, their language around problem solving changes, and their confidence improves.

Rania Huntington, visiting Professor in East Asian Languages and Literature, and Sara Miller, from CALS, both emphasized how collaborative work can help put students in charge of their own learning. Huntington said that for her Garden of Searching for Dreams project, students “were the ones asking and answering questions.” Following on the thread, Miller explained that in her projects, students “are designing the day’s learning” and in doing so “they really test their own understanding.”

Constance Steinkuehler from the Department of Education spoke about how collaborative and collective learning happens in early education, and then again in graduate school, but often not enough in between. Steinkuehler pointed out that this gap is particularly problematic, given that “collaborative and collective work is such a big part of what we do in society.”

Steinkuehler went on to talk about how in online gaming environments, or “playspace’s” it is “prestigious to contribute to the collective intelligence.” So, too when tackling collaborative tasks. I like the idea of thinking about collaborative learning environments, like our Collaborative Sites, as intellectual “playspaces.”

If you attended the session - what were your take-aways? If not, what are your tips for effective design of collaborative learning tasks? Let us know in the comments!