This topic is definitely my favourite one so far.
Personally, I felt like it really allowed us to really question and confront questions about our roles and dynamics in the group. Then subsequently, our fundamental understanding of what it means to work as a team in our work and in our students’ study. As a result, I genuinely felt a stronger connection with the rest of the team.
“Collaboration” versus “Collaborative learning”
To properly tackle this topic, we spent a good amount of time trying to define what exactly we understood by “collaboration”. To visualise collaboration in a context that we can all relate too, we first looked at the way our students worked. There are 101 ways to organise a team, but the most common, or perhaps the simplest, way is to:
- Delegate the work
- Put the individual pieces of work together (with some discussion to align ideas)
- Edit for coherency
Sure enough, we unanimously agreed that that was how our group functioned for the first 2 topics of ONL as well. Reflecting on our own learning, we realised that the way we gained knowledge was very much isolated. Meaning, we did not particularly need to rely on each other very much to produce the pieces of work that we did.
So, how does this process differ in “collaborative learning”?
I like to think that while the focus for our own understanding of “collaboration” to be outcome-driven and efficient, “collaborative learning” focuses much more on the process of learning and the people involved. To illustrate, we broke it down into 5 steps:
- Setting a common goal
- Delegation of work
- Peer evaluation and consultation
- Re-evaluation
- Repeat 3 and 4 if necessary.
Three key differences between the two processes is (1) the setting of a common goal and ground rules for team communication, (2) the amount of communication required between members of the group and (3) the integration of everyone’s ideas into every part of the work.
Our synchronous Zoom meetings were no longer presenting what we researched on in our own time, but filled with constant discussion about how to fit our ideas together into one coherent piece. Strangely, this did not take more time, yet the process was much more enjoyable.
It was then I really felt like we were truly figuring things out together.
For the group submission, we worked on dissected the steps we need to take to introduce the idea of collaborative learning into our classrooms. It follows Gilly Salmon’s 5-Stage Model, detailing the objective of each stage, as well as the resources and tools required to facilitate the process. I am rather proud of it and will say it is worth taking a look. Admittedly, it looks super complex. But I would like to think that its complexity attests to our efforts in truly producing a piece of work together.
A task-driven collaborative work will produce a jigsaw puzzle, where people may be able to take it apart and attribute each part to each member. A process-focused collaboration however, produces a piece of impressionist painting where the strokes of paint are broad and blended. Lines, blurred.
Borrowing the words from one of my group mates: If you cannot tell who did which part of the project, then that is a good indicator of successful collaboration.
