Home PublicationsL&LIssuesVolume 27 (1999-2000) December-January (No. 4)

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Technology coordinator Richard Goldsworthy discusses key elements of effective collaborative and cooperative learning, provides specific strategies for increasing the effectiveness of collaborative groups, and offers several online resources for beginning electronic collaborative projects.

A group of students comes in from outside. They are carrying a set of tools, one of which looks like a thermometer, another some sort of sock, and yet another a clipboard. The group members sit down around a computer workstation and busily type in something, discuss among themselves for a moment, then return to their seats. Later, one of the students, perhaps it was the one carrying the thermometer, reports to the entire class that it looks as though it’ll be an early winter in Colorado and that we shouldn’t be surprised if it rains tomorrow.

These students are involved in a collaborative activity with five other classrooms around the country. They begin each class by gathering such meteorological data from their area as rainfall amount, temperature, and wind direction and approximate velocity. This information is sent to each of the other five teams. They are responsible for reporting the data to the other teams before the end of the day, and they expect to receive the data from each of the other teams by the next morning.

When the students receive the information from their peers, they enter it into the database they designed themselves. This database allows them to track changes in the weather across time and location and begin to observe weather patterns across the country. In this case, the group also has a map that may be written on with dry-erase markers, and they post the weather information as it comes in.

All of the information is passed between groups with nothing more than an e-mail account at each location. What is more, the students at each location frequently start conversations with one another and grow, therefore, not only in their understanding of science and mathematics but writing as well. They are motivated to write, and write well, to an audience of their peers. Additionally, the within-group and across-group collaboration fosters intrapersonal and interpersonal understanding.

This is only one example of the many types of collaborative activities and projects in which learners may engage through the Internet. The Internet is a very rich, vast information resource; however, the Internet’s richness as a communications resource may be richer still, especially for K–12 education. To produce effective collaborative projects, teachers need to know four key elements of successful collaborative projects (described in the next section) and have a tool kit of essential resources for starting technology-mediated collaborative projects.

The Key Elements: Cooperation & Collaboration

Folks in business are increasingly turning to small workgroups and teams to accomplish their daily activities. There have been substantial changes in the way people interact personally and professionally. A concomitant change in the skills necessary to flourish in this changing society also is occurring (Toffler, 1980; Reigeluth, 1994). With the flattening of companies, management functions are increasingly being moved to the team level. Groups form, work toward their goals, and report their efforts to the highest levels of organizations. This trend toward cooperation is likely to increase. Teams not only form within organizational locations but also across locations. Teams even form across companies through partnerships and outsourcing and the use of communications technologies. Such a world needs people who not only can use the technological tools of the age but who can do so as part of a team.

Collaborative learning, therefore, has become an important part of our educational efforts.¹ To increase the effectiveness of classrooms, teachers are turning more and more to collaborative learning for:

• its role in developing social skills;
• its potential importance for learners entering the employment market in the 21st century; and
• its effectiveness in increasing learning, recall, and applications.

Let’s turn to some key markers of successful collaborative activities.

PIGS. Educators understand that placing students in front of educational computer programs does not mean students learn what we want them to learn. Similarly, placing children in a group and assigning that group a task is just as likely to lead to chaos as collaboration. Johnson & Johnson (1994) identify several essential elements to successful collaborative (cooperative) groups:

Positive interdependence—Students perceive that they can reach their goals only if the other students in their group reach theirs as well.

Individual accountability—Students perceive that they will each be held accountable for some aspect of the learning—they can’t loaf!

Group processing—Members of the group are encouraged to reflect on how well their group is performing.

Social skills—Students must be taught the basic interpersonal skills necessary to working in a group. These simply cannot be assumed.

Including these elements in your lesson plans when considering collaborative activities will greatly increase the likelihood for success. Read the online supplement for more information.

Essential Tool Kit: Starting Points & Strategies

The collaboration elements outlined above can certainly be used with students around a computer in your own class. For example, using a strategy called “one-stay, three-stray,” groups in your classroom would investigate assigned or chosen topics. At a time you choose, group members leave their “home” group to discuss with other groups what they are doing. One member remains behind to discuss his or her own group’s efforts with other “strayers.” In a computer classroom, groups of students could work on a project on the computer, then take time to explore what others are doing, and report back to their own group to implement the new ideas they have gathered by meandering.

The Internet provides another avenue for collaboration—across classrooms! The most common method of collaboration between classes is e-mail with groups of students from each class working on a joint project of some kind. However, many other types of collaboration are available on the Internet. Five of these types involve students:

1. corresponding with “keypals;”
2. participating in cross-classroom projects;
3. working with a mentor from a company, university, or elsewhere;
4. asking questions and discussing issues with experts in a wide range of fields; and
5. publishing their own work on the World Wide Web.

A list of resources for starting projects in each of these areas is available at http://php.indiana.edu~rickgo/collaboration.html. A lot of overlap exists among the types of collaboration that these sites support. Most of the sites also help teachers find other teachers for collaborative projects.

Finding Keypals. Rigby Heinemann Keypals (www.reedbooks.com.au/heinemann/
global/keypalt.html) is a great resource for students and teachers seeking partner classes. There are very recent requests, and the site seems to get a lot of use. The site has some guidelines for netiquette for e-mail exchanges.² The requests for partners are broken into Grades K–8 and 9–12. This site is sponsored by Reed Books, an educational publisher in Australia, and it also contains lesson plans, hot topic guides, and other resources.

The Electronic Emissary (www.tapr.org/emissary) matches subject matter experts and students or groups of students. Emissary volunteers also help coordinate the exchanges. Judi Harris, L&L’s Mining the Internet co-editor, directs the site.

A Few Collaborative Strategies

Rather than simply cast you into the sea of collaboration with nothing but your PIGS and a few Internet resources, I thought I would close with a few easy-to-implement strategies for kick-starting collaboration within and among your groups. Whether you have computers in your classroom or not, a few collaborative strategies can go a long way. These are some of my favorites.

Jigsaw. Learners have home-base groups. Individual members of the base group go off to learn about some aspect of a topic while participating in a temporary group. They then return to their base groups and teach each of their group members about their topics. Often the groups are assessed by quizzing a random member to foster both individual and group responsibility.

Roundrobin. The teacher directs the groups to report results or ideas, on paper or aloud, to the whole class. This is a simple way to foster idea sharing as well as piggybacking. I’d use Roundrobin when quick sharing of results is required, perhaps after a lab in science or after a Web or database search.

Think-Pair-Share (TPS). The teacher assigns students to pairs. Simple and brief, TPS involves thinking about a problem, writing down a solution, and sharing it with a partner or partners before discussing it with the full class. TPS, like many cooperative strategies, makes it easier for learners to share ideas with the full group because they have already shared them with a partner. Among other areas, TPS is effective for writing stories, generating topics, and considering alternate solutions.

Numbered Heads. More an assessment and distribution activity than anything else, numbered heads assigns group members a number by which they can be later polled or assigned roles. Numbered heads should be used anytime it would be useful to pull out members of a group fairly to either quiz them or assign tasks (e.g., all the #1s will be devil’s advocates this time). The numbers would also be beneficial in a jigsawing environment.

Turn to Your Neighbor. The task is fairly irrelevant with this strategy but should be something small and probably a review or summary. Simply ask learners to turn to the nearest person and share what they have been working on. In mathematics, this would include checking answers against one another. Two students quickly summarizing the results of search strategies on computers or their graphical representations of a problem using a spreadsheet and charts would be other examples.

Role Assignment. Simple but effective, assigning roles for students, such as encourager, devil’s advocate, summarizer, instigator, optimist, and pessimist, can help foster group discussion of topics. I would consider using this in initiating group discussion of an issue of the day or for jumpstarting a chapter discussion in small groups.

Phillips 66. Six people discuss a topic for six minutes. Then, a leader shares key points with the other groups.

Getting Started

It’s a great big electronic world out there and all you really need to get started are a computer, an Internet connection, a Web browser, an e-mail program, and this article!

Visit a few of the Web sites and check out my collaborative page for more places to find projects and support. If you need any help, e-mail me (rickgo@indiana.edu). I’ll do the best I can to help, because we’re all in this together. That’s what collaboration is all about!

References

Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T. (1994). Cooperation and the use of technology. In D. H. Jonassen (Ed.), Handbook of research for educational communications and technology (pp. 1017–1044). New York: Macmillan.

Reigeluth, C. (1995). Educational systems development and its relationship to ISD. In G. Anglin (Ed.), Instructional technology: Past, present, and future (pp. 84–92). Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited.

Toffler, A. (1980). The third wave. New York: Bantam.

¹ Collaborative and cooperative learning are sometimes referred to synonymously and other times set as opposed to one another. Here, for simplicity, I use the two terms interchangeably. Researchers tend to refer to group-based projects as cooperative when there is interdependence of team members. Back.

² Netiquette is etiquette for the Internet. Think of it as a digital Miss Manners. Back.

Copyright © 1999, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education). All rights reserved.