Collaboration Revisited
Usually when I require my students to try something in the classroom, a strategy, a technique, or a technology, for instance, I prefer to have already tried these for myself. I want assurance that what I’m asking of them is fairly within their scope and pedagogically valid. I want to be able to endorse these things.
In particular, I’ve been thinking about collaborative work as a strategy I’ve both watched my students do and engaged in myself with select peers. As a strategy for learning and creating, collaboration was not ideally realized long ago in my student days, and so, like many of my own students, I had the standard concerns about uncooperative or incompetent peers and their effect on my grades. But then, in my younger days, those few teachers who tried to bring in collaborative work were not very committed to the design or execution of our collaborative assignments.
As a case in point, I think consistently good collaboration requires time that we weren’t given. For this to work in a meaningful way, I believe partners need time to learn each other’s capabilities, to grow accustomed to each other’s personalities, and then to learn how best to work together. And then, should the collaborators be incompatible, which I have thus far found to rarely happen, the group could be reconfigured in a timely fashion if the projects are designed to be long-term, possibly semester-long.
I have introduced some design to encourage productive collaboration in my literature, composition, and business writing classes. In my core literature classes, the students’ group work contributes holistically to their participation grade, and since it doesn’t receive an independent grade, and since both I and my teaching assistants are on hand to assist these groups at all times, there is no reason for the students to see their collaboration as a high stakes activity. Similarly, in my composition classes, the collaborative work is not targeted with a grade, but rather it encourages brainstorming, peer review, editing, and emotional support.
In my business writing classes, however, some of the collaborative assignments receive specific grades. In these cases, I have tried to create groups with shared academic and professional interests, and I am relying on the maturity of the juniors and seniors who take the class to help compensate for any potential group friction. Additionally, there are still many individual graded assignments and this should help satisfy those students who may be either more competent or more motivated than their peers. In any event, their collaborative assignments are more reflective of the sort of work they are likely to encounter after graduation.
I hope that these collaborative encounters for my students have been and will continue to be as rewarding and productive as my collaborative projects over the last several years have been. Working several years ago with Dr. Lindsay Doukopoulos on our research into eportfolios and their incorporation into the composition classroom, as well as my current interdisciplinary collaboration with Dr. Megan-Brette Hamilton on our research into applying aural technologies in the classroom, have been very fruitful and gratifying for me. The key for me, and I would hope for my students as well, is the continuous cycle of feedback. My partners have responded thoughtfully to my ideas as I have to theirs, they have shown me possibilities in our proposals I had not seen, they have introduced an added layer of responsibility that encourages me to maintain my productivity, and they have filled in the gaps left by my insufficiencies.
