How Can Students Learn to Collaborate?

“Simply putting kids around a table and telling them to work together does not teach them collaboration skills,” says Wisconsin assistant principal Timothy Quinn in this Kappan article. In fact, assigning group work without prior instruction and thoughtful monitoring is lazy teaching. To learn the vital 21^st-century skill of working effectively within a group, says Quinn, students need to learn specific strategies:

• Listening to others
• Establishing common goals
• Assigning roles and responsibilities
• Deciding on measures of accountability
• Giving constructive feedback
• Compromising 
• Assessing the group’s progress

And at the outset, most students need the teacher to structure group agendas, for example:

• Discuss the problem and divide up tasks (10 minutes)
• Complete individual tasks (15 minutes)
• Reconvene to share individual work and synthesize information (15 minutes)
• Present the solution to the class (5 minutes)
• The teacher may even want to assign roles within the group at first.

And of course the teacher needs to monitor groups by establishing check-points, watching the human dynamics, and asking students to assess how things went. “Only with this type of training will students be prepared to engage in long-term collaborative assignments outside class,” says Quinn. 

When students work in groups, there are predictable problems. One student may continually harass another. Students may ask to be moved to a different group because of personality clashes. Finding meeting space for groups may be difficult, as well as finding time in students’ busy schedules for group work. And then there’s the question of how to assess each group’s work products and ensure that all students are pulling their weight.

Is it all worth it? Absolutely, says Quinn. “All of these issues are exactly why we should assign group work. Inequality, unfairness, interpersonal conflict, bureaucratic hurdles – this is the stuff of life. Without this experience, students… will be ill-equipped to handle these challenges when they confront them in college and the workplace.” 

“G-r-o-u-p-w-o-r-k Doesn’t Spell Collaboration” by Timothy Quinn in Phi Delta Kappan, December 2012/January 2013 (Vol. 94, #4, p. 46-48), www.kappanmagazine.org; Quinn can be reached at tquinn@usmk12.org. 

From the Marshall Memo #466