Designing for Collaboration

Putting students in groups is easy. Designing a reason for them to need one another’s thinking is different.

We put students in groups all the time, but putting four students around the same table does not necessarily mean they are collaborating. Students can divide an assignment, complete their individual parts, and put everything together at the end. The work gets finished, but was collaboration actually necessary?

For IYC learners, Collaborative & Empathetic Communication is more than working beside other people. Students need experiences that require them to listen to different perspectives, contribute their own thinking, work through disagreement, and make decisions with others.

The Learning Design Question: What have I designed that students cannot do as well alone?

DESIGN DIFFERENT PATHS TO INFORMATION
Give students a shared challenge or question, but leave room for them to determine what they need to know and where they might find it. In history, students might identify different sources or perspectives to investigate before the team can understand an issue more fully.
DESIGN FOR DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES
Encourage students to seek out people, stakeholders, evidence, or viewpoints that may challenge what the team already thinks. In science, students investigating a solution might discover that environmental, economic, and community perspectives lead to very different considerations.
DESIGN FOR A SHARED DECISION
Students bring what they discover back to the team and use the evidence to decide what comes next. An entrepreneurship team might conduct different customer interviews or research different parts of the market, then decide together what to change, what to keep, and why.