I Call Timekeeper! Some Reflections on Collaboration vs. Group Work

 

This week’s blog post was written by CLC Director, Bethany Silva, and UNH Doctoral Student in Composition, Ashley Barry. In this post, they reflect on some of the collaborative practices they've used in their CoRE-funded research project, Transformational Inquiry in Literacy and Digital Environments (TILDE) during COVID19.

We hate group work.

There. We said it.

The thing is, being in groups is kind of important. In the field of learning how to read, for example, the sheer act of listening to or reading a book and then discussing it is so impactful that multiple practices have arisen around ways to do it (a short list of their names: interactive read-alouds, literature circles, book clubs, socratic discussion). In the world of literacy, these types of group work (talking in groups) have been shown to nurture literacy development (See Lara Pozzobon da Costa’s blog post on that!). Additionally, being a good collaborative partner is important, you know, for everything (work, life, civics, learning). 

But not all work in groups is created equal. The reason that we (Bethany and Ashley) hate group work is because, in middle school, we’d end up in a group, and we’d look around, and we’d sigh and say, “I’ll take the notes.” And then we’d do most of the work**.

Right now, we’re both working in a research group called TILDE where the 12 of us (TWELVE) collaborate on a regular basis to better understand digital literacies in classrooms. AND WE LOVE IT. So, we decided to look at how this transformation happened and examine the characteristics of our experience to figure out what is happening here so we can copy it, and prevent our own students from hating group work, too.

Traditionally, middle school group work functions more as cooperation than collaboration. Kozar (2010) writes that “coop­eration is more focused on working together to create an end product, while suc­cessful collaboration requires participants to share in the process of knowledge creation” (16-17). This perfectly describes the difference between our experiences in middle school and our experience with TILDE. In middle school, we’d work on something in a group (but really solo) with the goal of turning something in for a grade, a product. In our TILDE work, we worked together to understand what it was we were trying to find out. This was more about the process of collaborating rather than creating an end product.

The goal of the TILDE project is understanding a phenomenon (digital literacies), applying our new learning to our teaching practices, and sharing with our professional community rather than focus on an end-product like making a rubric for, “10 steps to meet your digital literacies competencies.”

Some of our collaborative practices are adaptable across contexts. Here are three of those practices:

Have authentic purposes
This might sound obvious, but taking time to set group norms and making a list where we asked, ‘Why are we here,’ led to authentic collaboration. Asking group members to reflect on why they’re a part of this research team allowed everyone an opportunity to articulate their interests, what they hope to get out of our research, and what they bring to the table. Taking time to write down group norms ensures that all voices are included in the conversation. Also, articulating norms at an early stage acted as an opportunity to question the values embedded in our norms. One of our group norms is, “We are all experts in something - and all those somethings have lingo. We should value each other’s expertise equally and define terms for each other.” Saying this validates everyone’s experiences and expertise while also establishing that it is all of our responsibility to avoid using language in ways that make others feel less valued. 

Break-out rooms with a purpose
We approach learning and research from a constructivist perspective. Our general structure is:

• Introduce topic
• Engage with topic by doing/making/creating/discussing
• Reflect and debrief

For example, in one breakout room, we asked everyone to reflect on their experiences teaching digitally during COVID-19, share with a small group, and create a multimodal way to share out the group’s observations, like a meme, image card, or drawings. Later, these multimodal creations were used to help inform the creation of survey questions. This format asked us to engage with our data in tangible, creative ways that helped us to (re)envision our thinking. Additionally, each time we went into break-out rooms, we had a concrete goal that was both achievable and a bit of a time crunch. “Achievable” meant that we could get there. “Time crunch” meant we had to stay focused.  

What we Achieved Today
Collaborative work gets messy, so we end each day of research retreats by tracking our accomplishments to remind ourselves what we’ve done. When goals are too broad or abstract, it’s easy to come to the end of a day and feel like nothing has been accomplished. But rather than leaving people to feel that way, we took time to recognize the good work that we’ve done together--whether that was working on survey questions, creating group norms or analyzing data. 

Even though we led with, “We hate group work,” it turns out we actually love it! Because when we collaborate like this, it’s a joy as we recognize the good work we’ve done together and are deliberate and thoughtful about the processes and practices we use in getting there. It’s not about a race to finish a diorama on the American Revolution; it’s about the learning that happens while we’re working together.

***

**This wasn’t because we were so awesome. It was because we were too inexperienced to be in charge of creating an environment where everyone’s voices were heard. We suspect that many of the people we did projects for would have made valuable contributions if we weren’t so incredibly intimidating with our intellectual prowess.

Reference

Kozar, O. (2010). Towards Better Group Work: Seeing the Difference between Cooperation and Collaboration. English Teaching Forum, 48(2), 16–23.