I’ll be the first to admit I’m a complete oxymoron when it comes to working with groups. Although I have always loved working in collaborative groups with equally engaged peers, that particular promise of group work never seems to be the norm. After finding myself saddled with supplementing incomplete work from peers when our project was assigned a common grade throughout much of high school and college, I was over them. Give me the work, let me be done.
So where does the oxymoron come in? As an educator, I love placing my students in groups and asking them to work together. The richness of interaction afforded to each student working in a small group cannot be replicated in a large group interaction. Further, students are held more accountable in a smaller group setting as they cannot avoid discussion, participation, etc. without being readily noticed in the act. Where I differ from my instructors, however, is that my students in these groups were always held accountable for their individual work. When I was teaching, my students worked together daily but their grades were solely their own. I only assigned one group project, a cumulative evaluation of the course content, in which groups worked together, evaluated each other, and received a common grade. Students were, however, asked to assign specific tasks so I could ensure that each student was held accountable for the work they were to contribute. Given my love of engaging collaboration but my dislike of being stuck pulling the weight of the group, this seemed a great solution. Since leaving the classroom, however, I’ve learned more about Team Based Learning, the importance of allowing groups to self-regulate, etc. and would likely spend more time building a group and allowing them to define the processes that work for them were I in the K-12 classroom again.
Which leads me to the Collaborate (a Little!) assignment. Bob approached Kevin and I about completing the assignment together. Having worked together in a previous course, we already had a good feel for each other academically and it seemed a good fit. Using Google Documents, we were able to complete a threaded asynchronous conversation, asking questions, seeking clarification, or noting phrasing with which we disagreed. We moved through three iterations of the statements before we decided on the final version which we presented in a Google Site.
As part of our final presentation, we also preserved our original Google Document so you can see our interactions and discussion, how decisions were made, etc. I particularly found how past experience and our previous interactions with each other informed the conversation to be quite interesting. Enjoy!
