Manuscript Created 2010

COLLABORATION

Manuscript Created 2010

J. Jeannette Lovern, Ph.D.

The word collaborate evolved from the seventeenth-century Latin co- meaning us or two added to labor meaning to work. Likewise, a synonym, cooperate evolved from the same co- and the word operate meaning to be productive or efficacious. Operate was a more encompassing term because it meant that one was not just working, but being very productive and as effective as possible. During the Industrial Revolution, operatewas applied to machinery and meant that the parts were functioning well together (as in a well-oiled machine that’s running smoothly). Thus, we can conclude that collaboration and cooperation have been a part of the human experience for a very long time.

Petrulis (n.d.) states that few tools in a teacher’s toolkit are“as potentially powerful as small groups. Employing small groups and group projects creates possibilities for interaction and learning that could not be accomplished easily in other ways” (paragraph 24).Still, in my experience as a professor, teacher candidates often give me pushback when I require collaboration. I often get requests from students asking if they can do the work alone because either:

A)I always do all the work anyway and just put other students’ names on it and I don’t think that’s fair.

B) I simply can’t find the time to meet.

C) I don’t feel I learn as much when I do group work, or

D) I tried to work with HER but she simply is impossible (so I’m submitting MY work rather

than her inferior work).

I’ve even had the experience of the members of a group expelling one of the members of the group (even though the group members had been assigned by the professor) and copying me in on the e-mail in which they told the group member she had been expelled for not responding in a timely manner. (I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that on tv, there are shows in which members of a group vote people off!) By the way, I did not let that situation stand. All members of the group were brought together and a way to work together to accomplish the task was determined.

Collaboration among teachers is extremely important, and cooperative learning among students is one of the most valuable ways of learning. Thus, collaboration is a skill that teacher candidates should embrace and develop within themselves so that they can teach and model it to their students once they are in the classroom.

In this narrative, we will start with the collaboration among teachers and the rationale for why it is important. We will then move to discussing cooperative learning for students. Finally, we will consider the options for creating groups and for grading cooperative learning activities.

Collaboration Among Teachers

According to Inger (1993), when teachers work together in a school, they see substantial improvements in student achievement, behavior, and attitude. He postulates that students can sense the program coherence and a consistency of expectations and that that leads to the improved achievement and behavior. In addition, he believes that the collegiality that comes with collaboration breaks the isolation teachers sometimes feel being the only grownup in the classroom, and thus, it can bring career rewards and daily satisfactions. He also determined that teachers who work together on curriculum and instruction find they are better equipped to teach. “Teacher collegiality avoids the sink-or-swim, trial-and-error mode that beginning teachers usually face. It brings experienced and beginning teachers closer together to reinforce the competence and confidence of the beginners” (paragraph 7).

Shachar and Shmuelevitz (1997) did a study with 121 junior high school teachers to determine if teacher collaboration had an effect on teacher efficacy. They found that the teachers who reported a higher level of collaboration with colleagues expressed a higher level of general teaching efficacy as well as in their ability to enhance students’ social relations than the teachers who reported a lower level of collaboration. In addition, they found that the highly collaborative teachers implemented more cooperative learning activities in the classroom.

Little (1987) indicates the importance of teacher collaboration:

The complexities introduced by a new curriculum or by the need to refine an existing curriculum are challenging. Teacher teamwork makes these complex tasks more manageable, stimulates new ideas, and promotes coherence in a school’s curriculum and instruction. Together, teachers have the organizational skills and resources to attempt innovations that would exhaust the energy, skill, or resources of an individual teacher. The conclusions that one draws from the experiences of closely orchestrated, task-oriented groups in schools are consistent with conclusions drawn from other studies of organization: The accomplishments of a proficient and well-organized group are widely considered to be greater than the accomplishments of isolated individuals. (p. 496)

In order for collaboration to work, there are some key components that need to be in place (Inger, 1993):

1)Value has to be placed on the collaboration experience.

2)Authority has to encourage it (and sometimes assign it).

3)The groups need to be small enough (approximately three to six members) so that all members can have a voice.

4)Teachers (or teacher candidates) have to have some latitude in the scope of the work.

5)Teachers (or teacher candidates) need to be provided with training or assistance in collaboration if the group needs it.

6)Time needs to be made available so the collaboration can occur.

7)A concrete product (even if it is simply an oral report) needs to be the ultimate goal of the collaboration.

While it would be unfathomable that a teacher candidate could make it through an entire teacher education program without having participated in some collaborative experiences, it cannot be assumed that every candidate embraced the collaboration or saw its importance. Therefore, discussing the importance of collaboration, how it works, and its value is sometimes necessary in order for the experience to go smoothly, and to prepare the candidate to become a collegial and effective member of the faculty once she is placed in a school.

Inger (1993) concludes that schools benefit from teacher collaboration in four important ways [emphasis mine]:

1) Through formal and informal training sessions, study groups, and conversations about teaching, teachers and administrators get the opportunity to get smarter together.

2) Teachers are better prepared to support one another’s strengths and accommodate weaknesses. Working together, they reduce their individual planning time while greatly increasing the available pool of ideas and materials.

3) Schools become better prepared and organized to examine new ideas, methods and materials. The faculty becomes adaptable and self-reliant.

4) Teachers are organized to ease the strain of staff turnover, both by providing systematic professional assistance to beginners and by explicitly socializing all newcomers, including veteran teachers, to staff values, traditions, and resources.

Teacher candidates in Teacher Education Programs must not only be exposed to opportunities to learn together and to create products together, but they must be encouraged to embrace collaboration. It is simply one of the skills, and disposition of mind, that a truly effective 21st-Century teacher must have.

Cooperative Learning

Cooperative learning is an instructional method in which a group of students work together to complete a task (or tasks) with the ultimate goal being that the group members obtain a part of a knowledge base or a skill (or set of skills). In other words, they cooperate (work together) to learn something. While it often appears that the goal of most cooperative learning situations is the product (or presentation) that the group produces, the teacher should always remember that it’s the learning that occurs that matters.

Since the mid-1980s, cooperative learning has been considered one of the strategies of best practices in the classroom. The largest value of cooperative learning comes from the fact that teamwork encourages students to engage in higher-level thinking skills including analyzing, explaining, synthesizing, and elaborating.Many researchers (e.g. Cohen, 1994; Johnson & Johnson, 1989; Kagan, 1993; Slavin, 1990) have also discovered positive effects on students’ outcomes through cooperative learning. These can be in both the cognitive domain as well as the social domain. While sometimes cooperative learning involves simply two students working together, the more common usage involves a group of students.

When implemented appropriately, it has been determined that “cooperative learning improves acquisition and retention, higher-level thinking skills, interpersonal and communication skills, and self-confidence” (Kaufman, Felder, Fuller, 1999, paragraph 4).

The appropriate implementation of cooperative learning is key, of course. According Johnson, Johnson, & Holubec (1993), there are five key elements that differentiate actual cooperative learning from simply putting students in groups to do a task. These are:

A)Positive interdependence

B)Individual and group accountability

C)Face-to-face promotive interaction

D)Interpersonal and small-group social skills

E)Group processing

Positive interdependence involves the students recognizing that their success involves the entire group succeeding. This can be achieved through the delineation of shared goals, the dividing of the tasks among the members, and the sharing of materials. And often, the student’s grade (or at least a part of it) is dependent on the performance of the other group members.

Encouraging a sense of group membership can also contribute to positive interdependence. For this reason, especially among elementary and middle school students, teachers will often have the group give themselves a name. While some groups will simply combine their first initials (e.g. JMT; the LNRers), others will be creative (e.g. Balloon Water Bottles), imitative of pop culture (e.g. Timbaland; Harry Potter), or even inspirational (e.g. TTG, The Top Group; Awesome!). However, the name is not as important as the fact that the students feel a part of something.

Individual and group accountability involves the concept that each person must pull his own weight and that the group members must believe that the group is only successful if all members participate. Most of us have had the experience of having a hitchhiker in a group. Just as a hitchhiker gets the benefit of traveling from one place to another without paying for a car, gas, insurance, etc., a hitchhiker in a group gets the benefit of the group (a shared grade, for instance) without doing his part. Individual accountability can be encouraged through various means of evaluation (which we will discuss later). In addition, it can be encouraged simply through the presence of the teacher as the group is working, and through the development of a classroom culture of intrinsic motivation that comes from valuing the experiences taking place in the classroom.

Face-to-face promotive interaction involves not only students meeting together but being responsible for helping (promoting) each other learn. With the advent of technology, sometimes cooperative learning takes place without the members being physically in the same place (meeting on a social network, using a webcam, etc.), but it is still important that a face-to-face (or pseudo-face-to-face) meeting take place so that the students can bounce ideas off one another. If there are six parts to a project, and three members of the group, sometimes they will each decide to simply jigsaw the work. This would involve each member simply doing two of the parts, and then one member combining them into a final project. This almost always results in an inferior project. An important part of

• Listening - Students must listen actively in order to learn the required material and be able to teach it to others in their original groups.
• Speaking - Students will be responsible for taking the knowledge gained from one group and repeating it to new listeners in their original groups.
• Cooperation - All members of a group are responsible for the success of others in the group.
• Reflective thinking - To successfully complete the activity in the original group, there must be reflective thinking at several levels about what was learned in the expert group.
• Creative thinking - Groups must devise new ways of approaching, teaching and presenting material.

cooperative learning involves the cognitive activities that take place when one person makes a suggestion and another adds to it. So, while ultimately jigsawing may take place (particularly with secondary students who go off and do research individually), it is important that the group meet together initially to discuss the project, and again later, to discuss what they’ve found. (NOTE: Jigsaw II is a more formalized strategy and is described in the box to the left.) In addition, the sharing with one another will result in the brain storing the information in more than one place. As the old adage states, the best way to learn something is to teach it. By sharing, a group member is teaching the material she has found. In addition, as students interact with one another, they develop a personal commitment to not only their own learning, but to that of the other group members as well.

Interpersonal and small group social skills, while self-explanatory, are often overlooked by teachers when assigning group work. While a teacher will often spend a lot of time explaining the task(s) of the group, he sometimes fails to explain the importance of the teamwork and how it will be structured. The main social skills in cooperative learning involve allowing for leadership and followership, taking turns talking and listening, staying on task, using appropriate decision-making, building trust, communicating effectively, being respectful of each other, and being respectful of the other groups that are working in the vicinity.

The younger the group members, the more prescriptive the teacher needs to be in terms of delineating the behavior that is expected. For instance, if a group of three students are given a set of math manipulatives and told to figure out a problem using them, the teacher might have to tell the first-grade students that they are expected to take turns stacking the blocks, etc. Obviously, that would be offensive to seventh-grade students. However, those seventh-grade students might need to be instructed that the time spent on the problem-solving needs to be spent “on task and not discussing last night’s tv show.” Teachers often set up expectations for cooperative learning during the first time or two that the students are placed in groups. During the next few experiences, the teacher may simply give a prompt of “good cooperative learning behavior is expected.” After that, no verbal prompt may be required at all. However, she may occasionally need to quietly remind individual groups of the expected behavior when she notices they are not following the rules. Johnson and Johnson (1990) found that focusing on social skill development increased student achievement, and they postulated that that would enhance the students’ employability, their interpersonal relationships, and their general psychological health.

Group processing, as Johnson and his colleagues (1993) describe it, involves taking time to analyze how well the group is functioning as it is performing the group work AND to debrief at the end to analyze how well it went. In doing this analysis, the group would look at both the success of their progress toward meeting the goal(s) of the project as well as their success in working as a team.

In addition to the five key elements of cooperative learning, there are some vital components a teacher must provide when giving a cooperative learning assignment. These include:

1)Assignment of roles within the group

2)Clear expectations of the expected product

3)Clear deadlines

4)Clear guidelines for evaluation

Group roles. Depending on the nature of the assignment, as well as the ages of the group members, the teacher may decide to assign roles within the group. Sometimes, it is appropriate for the teacher to actually assign who will serve in each role. Other times, the teacher may announce the roles he expects within each group and let the group members decide on who will fulfill each. And, still other times, no particular roles are required.

In the literature, there are various suggested roles for cooperative learning groups. Three of the most common are shown in the table below.

In the first model, each person has a role and the product is usually just a simple task that can be completed in a short time. In the second model, the task is probably more complex. In the final model, everyone does a part, but the assignment coordinator makes sure everyone knows what they are expected to do, and the synthesis coordinator puts everything together once each person has done his/her part.