By Stokes Schwartz (CISAH) with some additional idea development and organizational help from CLAUDE
Collaborative learning (CL) is not a new idea. Many of us already rely on it to some extent as part of our teaching and learning practices. Yet for some, it remains one of the more underutilized tools in our collective pedagogical toolkit. That’s a shame, because the real-world skills students develop through well-designed collaborative work, for example communication, creative problem-solving, adaptability, and constructive feedback to name a few, are just what hiring managers across all fields say they need most in new graduates. Admittedly, CL is challenging to implement well, but its benefits far outweigh any perceived shortcomings that naysayers might point out.
At its core, collaborative learning is a fundamentally human endeavor. The activity is messy, dynamic, and rewarding when it works.
Like any high-impact practice, though, it asks something real of both instructors and our students: patience, flexibility, and a genuine willingness to learn alongside each other. The five points below won’t necessarily resolve every challenge that arises, but they offer a practical starting point for instructors looking to make CL a more intentional, sustainable, and meaningful part of their teaching practice. The rest, as they say, is up to the learning teams.
If you’re looking to make CL a more consistent part of your classroom, or simply revitalize your teaching practice, here are five quick points to keep in mind. Click on each heading for more detail.
Everything from the venerable think-pair-share (aka turn to your neighbor) during class to digitally enhanced team-based assignments or projects. Instructors might devise trios or teams of four, in which each member has a specific function besides contributing to the overall collaborative effort, before members kaleidoscope to form new trios or teams. Members of these new permutations first teach each other the information they bring with them before recording any new information shared by their temporary trio- or teammates. After a set time, students return to their original partners to share the information they bring back with them, filling in knowledge gaps or providing new insights.
Ideally, CL projects should empower students to determine (at least partially) how they’ll navigate close work with classmates. For less formal pair or teamwork during classtime, it might make sense to have a classwide discussion very early in the course to determine the norms of class interaction. Guided by a few key questions projected onscreen, small teams can discuss their thoughts before class reconvenes after a set time for a wider discussion. The instructor, or a student volunteer, can create a document based on student voices that is later shared to D2L to provide a concise guide on how discussions will proceed through the semester. For collaborative projects, on the other hand, teams can begin by determining a list of core member values that feed into the creation of a team agreement or contract. Teams should take care to include how members will navigate any unforeseen challenges that might arouse.
Students in classrooms that already integrate digitally enhanced learning, reflective learning, project-based learning, and problem-based learning can benefit from CL opportunities too. A digitally enhanced team assignment, for instance, might ask students to collaborate asynchronously via tools like Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Site, Canva, or Flipsnack, fusing a collaborative approach with technology-enhanced learning. Project- and problem-based learning are perhaps CL’s most natural dance partners, however, since both approaches ask students to pool their strengths, negotiate ideas, and co-construct solutions to real or simulated challenges. In short, collaborative learning doesn’t compete with these approaches; it enhances them. Likewise, a brief reflective component, for example an exit ticket or journal entry asking students what they contributed to, or learned from a teammate during class, adds a meaningful metacognitive practice to the collaborative experience, which brings us to the next point.
Beyond the specific team deliverable, instructors might consider building in reflection components to collaborative assignments, like peer evaluations, or process-oriented checkpoints that make each member’s contribution visible to the collaborative effort. One possible way to achieve that might be including a collaboratively drafted team reflection as part of a collaborative project. Here, team members move beyond a simple process description but instead revisit and examine team issues, challenges, or problems head-on. A key part of that should be members identifying how they navigated their way through those friction points. Most important, team members should also articulate concrete steps they can take to avoid similar issues with subsequent assignments. With care, that kind of layered assessment not only holds students accountable but reinforces the very skills (communication, self-awareness, critical thinking, creative problem-solving, and constructive feedback) that make CL worth doing in the first place.
At its best, CL is an ongoing, democratic, and mutually supportive process in which all members of a learning team are actively and appreciably involved from start to finish of an assignment, project, or semester. But reality doesn’t always match our carefully laid plans and instructions. Sometimes, despite our best intentions, instructors have to step in and provide additional guidance to struggling learning teams. That doesn’t mean collaborative learning doesn’t work, but it can be a juggling act on our part since students are not always realistic in how they perceive their team’s or their own collaborative skills. Instructors too must practice the same intellectual agility we hope to cultivate among our students. And as hard as it is, we must be the adults in the figurative room sometimes and wade into the occasional storm of Week 14 drama to right our students’ collaborative ships.