So I am still plodding through the Coursera course of Assessments of the 21st century skills and I continue to deepen my understanding of cooperative versus collaborative work. A new element comes in - group work!
So I will try to provide an example of the three in context of a classroom to clarify my understanding.
Group work - Teacher gives Chapter 3 of 'Charlie and the Chocolate factory' to the group for independent reading followed by a question answer task. All children read the chapter and answer questions. They are allowed to have a conversation, extend their learning by talking to each other and share answers. Teacher's role is to set the task and at the end mark and provide feedback. The answers are known.
Cooperative work - Teacher gives a cooperative task to the group, asking them to divide chapter 1, 2 and 3 between the group members. At the end of the reading children are to share the information and put the three together to create a story board. The learning intention is again clear and the end product is expected. Teacher's role is to define the parts of the task and scaffold as children are working on the story-board.
Collaborative work- Teacher provides an open-ended conceptual task. Charlie and the chocolate factory "Should Charlie have sold his ticket for 100 pounds? Why or why not? Discuss and present the views as a group." The task forces children to read, analyse, think, make connections (Text to text or text to world or text to themselves), discuss and decide on a way to present and finally present the task.
I am still working on the collegial - cooperative and collaborative continuum. There is a merit in each one of the stages/modes and different learning outcomes need different types of group work.
The question is how does the teacher assess individual capabilities while the group is working. Does collaboration need higher order skills as compared to cooperation? Therefore, can this model be used for differentiation in the classroom? What happens to the learners who operate in a different language or have a special need? How do they collaborate? What if someone doesn't want to collaborate? Coincidentally just today I watched an interesting TEDx talk on how the introverts with high IQ may actually get frustrated by collaborative work because their thinking actually gets regressed!
Some of the important points I learned today in regards to collaboration were:
Collaboration is the process of people working together for a common goal. It is not the same as cooperation but it does need cooperation. It is not simply putting people together with an expectation of pooled resources.
In a collaborative problem solving, people bring their own resources to solve the problem; they depend on each other to contribute information, skills and resources, and the members agree on the goal as well as the process to achieve that goal.
The steps to collaborative problem solving involve
- Recognising the problem - looking at the problem space.
- Common agreement on how this would be achieved and what info needs to be shared so everyone understands the problem.
- Plan of action and management of resources
- Analysing the problem, information and developing a systematic way of approaching the problem. - organise info, set goals, manage resources, be flexible, collect and contribute information, organise systematic steps to move forward
- Plan the move - could be together or step by step- progressive/sequential.
- Monitor progress, evaluate options, reformulate plans if needed in the face of +ve and -ve feedback.
- Check solutions.
Enough info the sort out for the day! All my faculties now need to cooperate! :)
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