Considerations When Planning Collaborative Tasks

Collaboration is culturally informed and, if we expect to have students engage productively in a collaborative task, we must model what that collaboration entails through role play, scripted conversations, recorded exchanges between students (much like coaches review playback videos with players). Explicitly naming collaboration moves and using moments of their occurrence as teaching moments is essential. Timely feedback to students engaged in this process is necessary to help students make necessary adjustments before fossilization occurs.

Interdependence vs. independence: Collaboration is one place of some intersection between American education systems and education systems that are more collectivist in nature. This intersection can be leveraged to bridge what students may understand about collaboration and interdependence to what might be new to them about collaboration and independence. However, we acknowledge the American system may define collaboration differently. Even within a team there may exist a hierarchy of importance of roles or an unequal distribution of power within a team. In naming these dynamics, we hope to establish a practice of regular reflection and subsequent use of protocols or tools to help students become aware of and name the imbalances in a group and take actionable steps to remedy situations so that gender, language ability, country of origin does not determine the level of power and individual holds within a group.