In this blog post I reflect on collaborative learning. Thinking about teaching and learning activities in general, I like to depart from simple questions. What is it? Why do we do it? How do we do it? So even in this reflection, I take these questions as a starting point. And yes, I stole the title for today’s blog post from one of the best known songs of a band that became famous after their Woodstock performance, Canned Heat.

What?

What is collaborative learning, then? Isn’t it the same as cooperative learning? The terms are used interchangeably often enough. But no. Very simply, the difference can be explained as two forms of group work, where cooperative learning mainly focuses on the product, while in collaborative learning the process is the most important. Another definition of CL (collaborative learnnig) is offered by the Instructional Design and E-Learning taskforce at Maastricht University, in the Netherlands: ”Learners engaged in CL share common goals, depend on each other’s contributions, evaluate each other’s ideas and monitor the work of their team members to successfully complete a task and solve a complex problem”.

Dron & Anderson’s (2014) definition of social learning can easily be applied to collaborative learning: it is ”not only enhanced and stimulated through reactions, discussion, and arguments with others, but also much knowledge confirmation, interpretation, contextualization and validation happens through interaction with others”.

Why?

So, why should we engage in collaborative learning? Brindley, Walti & Blaschke (2009) provide an answer by listing several benefits of collaborative learning: it develops critical thinking skills, it fosters reflection and transormative learning, and it enables the co-creation of knowledge and meaning.

Another reason for applying collaborative learning in one’s course is employability, even though the word isn’t the buzz it was some ten years ago. Still, in their future jobs, our students need to be able to work together with others, to make meaning of what is around them, to solve problems together. Other skills such as time management and leadership are also trained in collaborative work, so to counter the question of why we should use collaborative learning, I’d say: why not?

How?

Over to the million euro question, then. Collaborative learning doesn’t happen all by itself; as a teacher, you need to take several things into account in order to create a beneficial environmnet for collaborative learning to take place. I found Caroline Haythornthwaite’s article from 2019 particularly interesting, as she ends each section with practical recommendations on how to facilitate collaboration. As a teacher, you should design the task at hand to be relevant, structured and clear, but at the same time flexible to allow for learner autonomy. Take group size into account, too. Give clear instructions and have the students understand why you add this collaborative learning task at this point in your course, how they will benefit from doing it, and if/how it will be graded. Provide enough time to accomplish the task. Monitoring the student groups is also part of your job.

My personal experience

I’d like to share one epersonal experience of collaborative learning. But first, I should provide a quick background. For five years (2010-2015), I worked as an educational developer & project manager at the Swedish university of agricultural sciences, designing a strategy to implement generic skills. Group work was one of those skills – there were eight in total, already defined before I was employed.

I wrote a document that later served as a policy document, which among other things included three steps of progression for each generic skill, taking into account the introduction, the amount of scaffolding, and the examination of each generic skill.

I worked with the teachers, offering workshops on how they could include collaborative learning in their courses, working closely together in creating tasks and setting up criteria for examining/grading those tasks.

For the students, I designed introductory and more advanced lectures on the topic, and I created documents for them to fill out during their group work. Those documents comprised of a group contract, where they could record their own rules, contact details, meeting place and frequency, decisions taken, etc. An evaluation form was also included to assess progress and efforts for the group as a whole, but also for each individual group member.

While some students were not too enthusiastic in the beginning – why should we draw up contracts for just one group assignment? – the vast majority found the structured way of collaborative work beneficial, according to the course evaluations.

The most positive part of this was the satisfaction of the teachers, now having a joint platform to start from regarding generic skills (group work, in this case) in their own teaching. They were also happy with the recurring teacher development days and pedagogical lunches I organised together with the dean and staff from the library and the student support services, on the topic of generic skills, examination, curriculum design, information literacy, feedback, and more. Regarding group work, there was a kind of meta-thing going on: my work with the teachers was collaborative in itself, and lead to the teachers incorporating collaborative learning in their own teaching.

Every once in a while, when designing assignments, just before grading them, or when finishing a course, I like to go back to those simple questions I wrote starting this blog post. I find that if I can answer for myself what I do, why, and how, and if I can explain that to my students, it creates a common frame work or structure. And that feels good.

References

Jane E. Brindley, Christine Walti & Lisa M. Blaschke (2009): Creating effective collaborative learning groups in an online environmnet. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 10 (3).

John Dron & Terry Anderson (2014). Teaching crowds: Learning and social media. Athabasca University Press.

Caroline Haythornthwaite (2019). Facilitating collaboration in online learning. Online Learning 10 (1). ISSN 2472-5730.