Collaboration - More than "Playing Nice"

Much like my post on Critical Thinking, collaboration is one of those words buzzing around education circles. Its meaning, its definition, and its impact on learning is as varied as the number of classrooms trying to embed it. However, unlike critical thinking, many of us believe we understand what collaboration is and what it looks like. 

When I work with a group of people who start discussing collaboration, I often hear that we already do group work in school. I also hear conversations about effectiveness of that group work being judged by how many conflicts arise and whether the task is accomplished. I absolutely agree that this is a beginning conversation on collaboration, but it cannot be the end. In his book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, Robert Fulghum gave these first three points:

1. Share everything.
2. Play fair.
3. Don't hit people.

I believe this is a pretty concise definition of cooperation. Cooperation is a first step on the way to collaboration. But remember, the root of collaboration is to “Co-Labor.” To work together. To accomplish more together than we could on our own. 

Austin Kleon’s book, Show Your Work, says, “What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.”

For our students to create great work, we need to give them the opportunity to interact, to share, to experience, and to disagree with a wide variety of people, places, and ideas. We need to design these opportunities to collaborate beyond just getting along. Facilitating discussions, asking questions, and demanding that the sum of the work is greater than the contributions of the individual is our imperative as education professionals.

Sometimes cooperation-on-the-way-to-collaboration is a fantastic teacher tool that gets students to a learning objective faster. My kids recently discovered the wonderful world of Osmo. I was so excited to see them working together to solve a problem. It warmed my mother/teacher heart.

However, this is play. This is cooperation. They’ve been proficient at parallel play and cooperative play for a very long time. They worked together without fighting and solved a problem. Could they have solved this problem on their own? Absolutely. But they solved it faster by working together.

In school, this is where we get to turn fun into real learning. What do we do with that added time we get from successful cooperation? We get to deepen the learning! Ask those kiddos why they made the decisions they made and spark a conversation between them. Have them try to find a new solution to a problem they already solved and watch them build on their previous knowledge.