“We are built to collaborate,” writes Dr. R. Ritchhart in his book Cultures of Thinking in Action. In this chapter of the book, the author discusses the importance of promoting authentic collaboration in education. “(I)deas get better when they are challenged, discussed, explored, and generally given a good workout. And yet schools tend to see learning as an individual endeavor built on compliance and competition and punctuated by awards, prizes, and levels of attainment (Elmore 2019).”
In the U.S., traditional teaching methods and perspectives on the roles of students and teachers have made learning seem more like an individual race to the finish than a team sport. How can educators change that in today’s classrooms? One way is to consider a mindset change to: Learning and Thinking Are as much a Collective Enterprise as They Are an Individual Endeavor.
If you haven’t already had a chance to review our discussions on Chapters 1-5 of Cultures of Thinking in Action, you can take a look at the first five sessions of this teacher’s book club series.
Making Learning a Collective Endeavor in our Classrooms
When you enter a classroom in the U.S. today, there’s a good chance you will see students working together on a group assignment. Over the past 10 years, educators have identified the importance of building skills like small group communication and collaboration in the classroom, no matter what subject they teach. But are all group projects providing the same type of collaboration between students? How can we distinguish between a true learning group and a group of students who are just working together to complete an assignment?
It's not just the demands of the task, what distinguishes a collaborative learning group from just group work is the culture of student-student, student-class, class-student, and teacher-student interactions taking place. Before students can practice authentic collaboration, both the teacher and their students must shift their mindset on how learning happens and what the results of their learning should be. That’s not an easy thing to do! Education in the U.S. has been historically perceived as a singular, competitive pursuit and many of us have had similar experiences. Whether that’s in the form of grades, academic competitions, or standardized test results – “success” in our education system can seem like it’s more about how much you finish than what you understand along the way.
How do we change that mindset now? We do it by building a classroom culture that recognizes the unique strengths and contributions of classroom participants: me as an individual, my peer, my teacher, and our class as a collective. Switching our mindset as both educators and learners to the belief that we are allies in learning with the power to observe, learn, and contribute to our own understanding as well as the understanding of others. But to activate this mindset, educators must move away from teacher-directed instructional practices and towards student-directed ones. The goal is to feed and empower students’ natural curiosity as the vehicle for students engaging the standards in practice.
Accomplishing this type of mindset change takes thought and practice. We shouldn’t expect our students to come to us with the communication, collaboration, and other skills needed to build a new type of classroom culture, most likely they will need help with the new framework. Teachers can teach thinking routines and use scaffolds to help their students develop collaboration skills and identify actions they need to figure things out. As teachers we can model the behaviors and engagement we expect our collective to achieve and use tasks that create a meaningful place for that engagement to take place.
Changing our Mindset on Group Work and Collaborative Learning
Once we’ve started building a culture that prioritizes student-led inquiry, what distinguishes tasks that are authentically collaborative versus just group work? First, authentic collaboration requires more than students successfully divvying up work or assigning roles and completing an assignment. Instead, it requires the entire class, including the teacher, to put into practice a collective mindset: we're stronger and more effective learners when we work together to develop each other's understanding. What does this look like in practice?
A key result from true collaboration is that when we’re done, everyone can explain how the different pieces go together and why each piece is meaningful and connect to our previous knowledge. Group work where individuals complete a part or play a role, and then come together to report out, doesn’t generate this type of deeper learning by requiring the learner to struggle with each piece to help develop its meaning and place. In fact, traditional group work often results in one or two people doing most of the work and all of the learning. In contrast, when we act as a learning collective the blending of unique perspectives, ideas, and experiences is everyone's responsibility resulting in deeper learning. Then the process of collaboration – of experimenting, taking apart and putting back together, questioning, or discussing – is valued for what it brings to our collective understanding.
Teachers can help put this mindset into action by stopping answering the questions our students pose. Wait, what?! Yes, you heard that right. Stop giving them the answers. Instead, show students you believe in the importance of the processes, tools, and skills they need to answer those questions on their own as part of class on a mission. In doing this, we’re building more effective learners, and our collective learning community is strengthened by the different perspectives and experiences students and teachers are sharing and learning through collaboration. When we, as teachers, walk into our classrooms excited to learn as much from our students as they can learn from each other, we’re building a culture where authentic collaboration can thrive.
Group work without authentic collaboration is like a jigsaw puzzle. Our students may discover the right pieces, but we haven’t required them to develop the pieces together, put them together, judge their significance and identify what emerged from those pieces. When the goal of our classroom culture is to reach collective understanding rather than to finish a task, this requires all students to participate in that process and gives them ownership over the value they bring as participants.
Socratic Dialogue, Scientific Discourse, and Authentic Collaboration
Science teachers often use Socratic dialogue, or group discussions, to bring students back together after a hands-on investigation and discuss their findings. These student-led discussions help the class come to a collective understanding of what they’ve learned and what they want to investigate next. When students understand the role their work plays in the class’s collective learning process, they are more engaged in planning and completing lab work.
Socratic dialogue gives students the opportunity to improve communication skills in small and large groups. It teaches them how to question peers appropriately and effectively, and to build on their own knowledge and understanding with new information gathered from peers and the collective group. These students are learning how to build effective work relationships, collaborate with different types of learners, and communicate effectively in different situations. Lab work becomes not about finishing an assignment, but an important part of building a collective understanding of the world around us.
When we think about the role student-led investigations play in our classroom's collective learning environment, they also give students a hands-on look at how scientists build understanding in the real world. Just like a group of scientists, these students have brought their own experience into a collective set of knowledge to solve a problem. They have refined and improved their understanding based on testing their ideas and sharing those experiences in the lab with the collective. This supports dialogue aimed at coming to consensus on what has happened and what it means, this sparks new understandings and questions that build understanding in individuals and the group. Sometimes students can learn more from experiments that don’t turn out as expected! But, when they are part of a collective rather than a competitive environment, students can experience the joy of investigating, experimenting, and learning even when the result is identifying what doesn’t work. That’s authentic collaboration in action.
When we build a culture that celebrates collective learning, students learn how to build working relationships that balance their own ego with contributing to the collective. Being a good citizen in this classroom isn’t defined by an individual win. Instead, it comes from advancing one’s own understanding by contributing and pulling on the understanding of the group, a dynamic that requires compromise, collaboration, and valuing the different ideas that individuals bring. What do we value most as a class? That’s the mindset shift that must occur before a true collective can thrive. Students can be challenged to discover: How do we help one another and learn from one another? How do we move individual learning from competing against each other to creating and understanding together?
Ideas for Shaping Collaborative Classroom Culture
Building a culture in our classrooms that embraces collaboration over promoting individual wins should start on day one. To start, teachers must communicate this mindset to their students: We are stronger and more effective learners together. Activities that promote teamwork and give students an opportunity to start building stronger relationships with one another early on can help them collaborate effectively throughout the year.
One way to share that we build a community that values the collective as well as individual perspectives and experiences students bring to the classroom is “Morning Meetings.” These can be quick check-ins with students to start the day, asking them to share something important that they’ve learned, are thinking or worrying about, or is exciting them. Learning more about their classmates and what makes them tick helps students to connect and improve how they work together, support one another, and learn together. It also gives teachers an insight into what’s affecting our students.
Teachers can also model the type of sharing, collaboration, and thinking we’re looking for by making our own thinking visible to our students. We should give clear and direct feedback that shows we appreciate students sharing, collaborating, and contributing to the collective. We can post the mindsets that are important to us in our classroom and refer to them throughout the year, reminding students that we’re building a classroom culture together.
What Makes a Collaborative Group Effective?
What attributes do the most effective collaborative groups have in common? There are many different ways to answer this question, but four of the most important factors according to researcher Jermone Bruner (1996) are:
- Agency - taking control of one’s learning
- Reflection - making the learning make sense
- Collaboration- sharing the human resources of all those involved in the mix of teaching and learning
- Culture - the way of life and thought we construct, negotiate, and establish.
How can teachers help our students better understand and put into practice attributes that support collaboration? First, agency is something that we know has a direct connection to student engagement. When students feel like they have no agency in the classroom, they are less engaged in the learning process. We can see this at the most basic level when we think about participation in classroom discussions. When we create a culture that promotes collaboration, students know that their input, questions, and suggestions are welcome and productive to the group. This lowers the barrier of entry into a conversation. Students know that they don’t have to understand everything to get involved. In fact, asking a question, asking for clarification, or questioning the information being shared is valued as a helpful tool for all of us as we come to a better understanding together. It’s okay to say, "This was really confusing to me. Can somebody help? Was anybody else confused by this? I thought this meant that. And now I don't know."
When we give students the opportunity to be curious, that’s a powerful learning tool. They don’t need to hide if they don’t understand something and in fact, we expect them to ask questions, be curious, poke around, and help others by sharing their perspective and connections. To put this into practice, we must build learning communities based on respect for others’ views which starts with listening to understand others’ views. We must recognize and reward the value this diversity brings to our collective understanding. When we actively engage students in the act of reflection and value their contributions, we are empowering them. We’re showing them that they have agency and we see them as capable.
Teaching Practices that Promote Collective Learning
To identify what teaching practices help promote collaboration, it’s beneficial to consider what practices may hinder it. One traditional teaching method that stands in the way of collective learning is teacher-led discussions. When the teacher is doing most of the talking and the students are doing most of the listening, this isn’t a classroom where students are empowered to drive the discussion and engage in authentic intellectual collaboration. Instead, group discussions that are lightly teacher facilitated yet student-led are the place to find collaboration thriving.
Listening practices are another important tool for promoting collective learning. As teachers, we can model active listening for our students by listening to them carefully and asking the type of open-ended questions that get our students thinking deeper. Can you explain what you mean by that? Can you give me an example? Can you repeat that, I think I missed what you were getting at. Modeling inquisitive questions like these shows our students that we’re listening and valuing their input, and it gives the students who have a harder time entering into a group discussion good examples of ways to do so.
Asking the wrong type of questions, ones that are too narrow or that have a clear-cut answer that points towards a singular answer, doesn’t encourage student-led inquiry and collaboration either. We can hinder collaboration as teachers just by being too helpful – by answering our students’ questions instead of giving them the opportunity to build that knowledge themselves. Over-scaffolding activities and simplifying tasks so they don’t require complex problem solving and connecting big ideas are other ways we can hinder collaboration.
To enhance collaboration, teachers should build students’ capacity to ask their own facilitative questions that generate deeper thinking. We can model the type of thinking and wondering we want to see in our classroom by calling it out when we see it – naming and noticing when students are thinking deeper and learning from one another. We can also work to build a culture where different viewpoints are heard and considered so that everyone has a chance to share their ideas freely and without fear. Creating a safe space for experimentation, questioning, and wondering is key to fostering true collaboration.
Creating a Safe Space Where All Students are Contributing
Building a classroom culture where everyone’s ideas are valued is not a short-term endeavor. Some students will feel comfortable getting involved in collaborative learning sooner than others. One way to support all students entering into collective learning is to give them time to process, organize, and rehearse their thoughts before they’re invited to share them with the larger group. We can give students tools to help, like sentence starters and thought maps. We can ask students to share their ideas in pairs and small groups before coming back together for a larger group discussion.
It’s important to find a good balance between supporting and over-protecting students. Sometimes, the most collaborative thinking comes from coming at a problem together in real time. Once students feel comfortable working together and sharing their ideas with the group, problem-solving together can generate great discussions where students feed off one another’s ideas and energy.
When we think about the type of feedback we give students, it’s important that teachers think carefully about how our input impacts how students are collaborating and building on one another’s ideas. Sometimes, validating contributions from individual students can set up a sense of competition for students to only share what they think their teacher is looking for. Or, our feedback can feel like judgment to students and make them think twice before they risk sharing again.
If we think of that Socratic dialogue model, where students are getting into scientific argumentation, sharing different ideas, using evidence to support them, and coming to different conclusions – this can feel very personal. This provides a great opportunity to teach students how to give valuable feedback to their peers without passing judgment. Students are also learning how to accept feedback and incorporate it into their knowledge base without getting their feelings hurt. Teachers can model how to do this effectively with our own thoughtful feedback. We can discuss the importance of being mindful about sharing feedback in a respectful and positive manner that isn’t personal, but shows we value how others think and reason out a problem differently than we do.
Building Allies, Not Competitors in our Classrooms
“As students share ideas and resources, they assume joint responsibility for learning (Halpern et al. 2013). This creates a safe environment in which students view one another as “allies” rather than competitors, thereby increasing engagement (Boaler 2006) and academic achievement (Dana-Center 2020).” – Dr. Ritchhart
When we create a safe place for authentic collaboration to thrive, we’re giving students the opportunity to see one another as allies in their learning journey, rather than competitors. This creates a very different dynamic in our classrooms, and within the collaborative work opportunities we provide our students. But does it change how they view the purpose of school as well?
When we think of building a collective learning community, we’re building a safe space for students to be their genuine and authentic selves. This may be the first time they’ve been asked to play a leading role in the classroom. In this environment, students and teachers share the same goals, purpose, and values. That creates a sense of belonging and a welcoming place for both teachers and students to be. Instead of thinking of school or learning as being difficult, stressful, or something impossible to achieve – in a collective, we’re all working together to achieve understanding. These students feel supported by the knowledge that their teacher and their classmates value their contribution and believe they play an important role in the community.
Classrooms with cultures like this are helping to inject joy into learning. These teachers are helping their students experience the delight of figuring things out and helping others achieve their goals. These students feel like they have multiple allies in their learning journey. To start building a classroom culture like this, or to work on improving it, we should first ask ourselves what our students are thinking. How do they view learning and their classmates when they are in our classroom?
In contrast, many students have learning experiences that feel like a track and field event. They are running towards the finish line and their teachers are placing hurdles in their path. If they can jump enough hurdles, they’ll get good enough grades and move on to the next race. That view of education is extremely individual and feels very limiting. These students are viewing their teachers and classmates as competitors. When a hurdle seems insurmountable, they don’t have teammates to help so why try. But when they’re in a collective, students know that their individual ability to get over a hurdle doesn’t matter as much as their ability to pull together the resources necessary to make progress. They know that someone has their back and that they are capable of helping others in return. In fact, these students understand that they’re not being measured against their ability to jump hurdles at all. Instead they’re playing an important role and increasing their own understanding as part of a collective learning community.
How Administrators Can Support Collaborative Learning
The positive effects of collaborative learning can be felt by more than just students, and all members of our school learning communities should be looking for ways to promote it. When we incentivize collaboration between teachers, and between teachers and administrators, we build stronger school communities.
Dr. Ritchhart writes, “When teachers view teaching, and learning to teach, not just as an individual enterprise, but also as a collective endeavor, they are more likely to take risks, engage in innovative practices, develop a greater sense of efficacy, be more confident and empowered in their teaching, and increase their motivation (Fullan and Hargreaves 1996; Rosenholtz 1989; Webb and Ashton 1986). Not surprisingly, student outcomes also improve dramatically.”
Building collective learning communities within our professional groups is just as complex as it is in our classrooms. How can we promote collaboration that is categorized by the same levels of inquiry, reflection, and examination between our colleagues? It starts with the same belief – that we’re stronger together and that when we collaborate, we can affect changes in our learning community.
To start, administrators and teachers must make collaboration with our colleagues a priority. Educators need to make time to watch each other teach, ask each other tough questions, and pick each other’s brains for ideas and solutions. The time teachers spend in one another’s classrooms is incredibly helpful. Sharing cool things that we’re doing in our own classrooms and the results we’re seeing is beneficial to both our colleagues and ourselves. But these conversations take time and administrators who value collaboration must help teachers build time for it into their yearly routines. They must build a school community that comes together to work towards its shared vision.
