Yours, Mine or Ours?

The student looked puzzled. “I thought this was supposed to be a group project. Is this presentation a group thing or not?”

I was taken aback by his confusion. We were well into the semester and I thought the students had a good handle on their goals and responsibilities. But I listed for him the various assignments coming up and explained which were graded as a group and which were graded individually. He seemed satisfied and went back to work, but I was unsettled. Clearly, I had missed the mark somewhere.

It isn’t hard to understand the student’s concern. Most often, schools emphasize learning as an individual goal, and, indeed, use competition to motivate students to excel. At Capitol, however, our focus is less on competition and more on collaboration and cooperation. The English Communications II class, of which this puzzled student was a part, fosters a collaborative learning environment and, as such, is a new experience for many students.

I see three distinct learning modes. One is competition, in which students work independently on assignments, completing whatever thinking, writing, and research is required to finish the task at hand on their own. At the opposite end of the continuum is cooperation, in which students work together on one task, sharing the work load and sharing the same grade. A third mode, a hybrid of the two, is collaboration, in which students work independently on some assignments, but act together on others while focusing on a common goal. Collaborative learning teaches students to work together and separately at the same time. Students are encouraged to share resources, discuss ideas, read and comment on each other’s work, and build consensus on issues that affect them all. The first two modes are more traditional, and thus easier to understand and model.  The third, collaboration, is less common, more vague and undefined; that’s where the student above got lost.

The English Communications II students are a diverse lot. Some would be happier working alone, and accepting sole responsibility for the outcome of their individual efforts. Others would rather share the workload and the responsibility with peers, content to accept a group grade. But both tend to balk at collaboration, as that mode comprises the worst of both worlds, so to speak. In EN102, students are required to write individual research papers, while working with peers to uncover common issues, question assumptions, point out errors in thinking, and find common ground. Those who prefer to work independently may be reluctant to trust others to a good job, while those who welcome joint efforts can be uneasy with complete responsibility for complex assignments.

As a result of this student’s question, it was clear that further clarification of collaborative learning was called for. Collaboration, in many ways, is the essence of scientific research. While competition plays a part, notably by speeding discoveries such as the race to map the human genome, and cooperation (teamwork)  is absolutely essential for highly complex endeavors such as putting man in space, it is collaboration that underlies them both. Building networks of colleagues, presenting and attending conferences and seminars, sharing results through professional publications, and constant reading in the field are all  components of collaboration. The EN102 class allows students to get a taste of this most necessary mode of learning.

As Isaac Newton famously stated, “If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”