The collaborative learning toolbox

In my first blog, I wrote about how Tomasello (1999) sparked my thinking about collaborative learning and how it creates possibilities to revolutionize lifelong learning, particularly in formal settings. I am often perplexed at how many educational spaces and contexts still conform to a learning model that places an expert at the front of the room with mostly passive learners seated in rows facing said “expert”. While theories and practices abound that promote social and collaborative learning, most of our public school classrooms, continuing education lectures, and higher education curricula still follow the student/ expert learning model.

Even in a masters program focused on engaging with theories of how learning occurs and enhancing teaching, facilitation, and program development skills, I have been disappointed by the lack of collaborative and innovative learning opportunities in my classes. Besides Donovan, few professors use creative teaching, discussion, and evaluation processes. I commend Donovan for his use of blogs, video feedback, and evaluation methods focused on learning instead of grading. Why aren’t more of our professors using these approaches?

In this blog, I aim to share some of the learning tools I am aware of and use in my facilitation practice to enhance collaboration and participation. I work as a process facilitator, which means that I help groups of people work through process, including problem solving, planning, visioning, decision-making and dealing with conflict. My mantra as a facilitator is to never work harder than the people I am working with. So, as much as possible, they direct and create their own goals and actions, while I lead the process in getting there.

I try to encourage creative thought and active engagement through the use of a variety of approaches and activities in my facilitation toolbox. I choose the tools and customize the process based on the specific learning needs of each client. I have only been doing this work as a consultant for a few years, though have been using facilitation techniques as part of my work for over a decade. Whenever I work with a new colleague I learn new collaborative techniques, so the examples I offer below really only begin to scratch the surface of possibilities.

And, I’d love to hear from you- what collaborative learning approaches have you used?

Some of the collaborative approaches I use include:

Check-in-

A check-in is a way to assess participants at the beginning of a process. Usually, this is a quick process, whereby participants answer a short question, sharing it in small groups or the large group.

Check-in questions can focus on participants’ expectations of the day, what they are excited about, what they are leaving at the door in order to be present, gifts or skills they bring.

Check-out-

Similarly a check-out asks a reflection question at the end of a process. Check-out questions can focus on what stood out, specific learning, feelings, next steps, or new knowledge or skills.

Group agreements-

Group agreements help to create safe and supportive learning environments. I often just ask the group I’m working with a question such as, “What are the necessary ingredients that would allow you to feel safe and comfortable and trusting of the group and enable you to participate fully to the best of your ability?” Typical responses are things like respect, active listening, confidentiality, etc. I capture the responses, and post them for the duration of the event. I can then refer to the agreements if any issues arise, such as disrespectful language, or an overbearing participant.

Think-pair-share-

Participants are asked a question, and have a short time to think through their response. This could involve writing, thinking, or moving. They then turn to a partner and share their response. Participant responses can they be shared with another learning pair or within the larger group. Participants are given the opportunity to learn by reflection and verbalization.

World Cafe-

The World Cafe is an innovative methodology for hosting important conversations. Open-ended question(s) asked in small groups engage participants in active, meaningful conversation leading to consensus and understanding. These conversations are then shared back to the larger group..

Open Space-

Open space is an approach to learning events, focused on a specific and important purpose or task—but beginning without any formal agenda, beyond the overall purpose or theme. The initial lack of an agenda sets the stage for the event’s participants to create the agenda for themselves, generating the issues they want to discuss and setting up informal break-out groups to do so. This approach acknowledges the power of participants to self-organize and hold the solutions to their own issues or problems.

Graphic Facilitation and Recording-

Graphic facilitation is a unique facilitation technique that uses large scale visuals to help groups of people see what they mean resulting in effective, creative, and productive meetings and workshops. A graphic facilitator helps groups talk and think together, and get clear and focused to move toward problem solving and strategic planning.

Appreciative Inquiry-

Appreciative Inquiry is about the search for the best in people, their organizations, and the relevant world around them. In its broadest focus, it involves systematic discovery of what gives “life” to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most constructively capable in economic, ecological, and human terms. AI involves, in a central way, the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential.

These are a few of the approaches I use in my facilitation work, to increase participation, enhance collaboration, and value participant input. I wonder what our GSLL classes would look and feel like if professors used more approaches like these? Would we be more engaged in the material? Would we learn more?

Source:

Cooperrider, David L and Kaplin Whitney, Diana. (1999). Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

The Cultural Origins of Collaborative Learning

What if the purpose of learning is collective transformation and well-being? If we set up classrooms, workshops, and educational spaces and processes based on collaboration rather than competition, what different ways of knowing would be encouraged and created? If educators promoted collective and cooperative values over individual success, how would learning outcomes change? How would the culture of human beings change? Reading Michael Thomasello’s book, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999), sparked these questions, though I have been pondering similar ones for a number of years. Indeed, I am drawn to academic and activist work that acknowledges our deep need for collaboration, and the fact that our inherent abilities to collaborate may be the key to personal, social, and political transformation.

While Tomasello’s book is not explicitly about educational processes, it offered me a new perspective as an adult educator, specifically, that humans learn differently than non-human primates in unique ways. The book explores our species’ unique abilities to learn, including the history and evolution of human understanding and intelligence. In addition, the author examines how humans compare cognitively, socially, and culturally to other primates, with a focus on the origin and development of language acquisition processes.

Tomasello argues that humans are fundamentally different from non-human primates because of our ability to understand the intentions and mental states of other humans. We also develop within a unique socio-cultural environment, as young babies imitate their parents, and toddlers see others as the same as they are, motivated by the same goals and intentions. Non-human primates, on the other hand, do not exhibit these capacities. The unique human capacity to do all of this allows us to accumulate our ancestors’ experiences and innovations that have been tested and built on over centuries, something Tomasello (1999) calls the “ratchet effect”. This allows humans to constantly build on new knowledge and transfer it through culture to generate invention and transformation that allows us to survive and thrive.

Tomasello looks at how the human race has collaboratively combined biological adaptations, cognitive ability, and unique cultural intelligence to prosper on this planet. His innovative research looks at how children form joint goals, how they decide to do something together, how they then plan together to make it happen, and share in the resulting outcomes. Tying this back to evolution, he demonstrates how we have benefited over time from our collective intelligence. He asserts that “It’s not that humans can read one another’s minds, but they put their heads together to collaborate to do things that they cannot do alone…and humans maintain the collaboration over time, while other non-human primates cannot” (2010, 2:36).

When our species walked out of Africa around 60,000 years ago, our ancestors used collaboration to learn, survive, and thrive. We continue to do so innately rather than intentionally, and one example of this is our public education system. The curriculum is not based on collective goals or collaborative processes, instead it focuses on individual achievement and competitive advantage. Drawing on Tomasello’s assertions of our unique human capacities to learn through collaboration, perhaps we can imagine collaborative learning spaces, where students are not pitted against one another, but rather build on one another’s intelligence and ideas to reach new outcomes. What could humans achieve if this was the case? Could we solve climate change issues, tackle poverty and intolerance, or create a world where 99 percent live sustainably, abundantly, and harmoniously? Certainly we have the technological capabilities to do these things, but lack the moral mindshift we’d need to get there.

I believe we need to tap into our species’ unique collaborative process that allows us to ratchet learning, success, and innovation to create this shift. Richard Sennett (2012), sociologist and author of Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation, suggests that since our world is more interconnected than at any time in its history we must learn the craft of cooperation if we are to make our complex society prosper. And he reassures us that we can do this because the capacity for cooperation is embedded in human nature. While his motivation for knowledge might be distinct from Tomasello’s, they come to the same conclusion, that we need to pay attention to how humans collaborate.

References

Heineken Prizes. (Producer). (2010, November 18) Heineken Prizes - Professor Michael Tomasello. Retrieved January 20, 2012, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dtf2btmfPgw

Pagel, Mark. (2012). Cooperation, the secret weapon of our species, New Scientist, http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2012/01/cooperation-the-secret-weapon-of-our-species.html

Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.