Collaboration, Good or Bad

Do you like collaborating, do your students like collaborating? Have you been in a meeting with your peers, to have one person do all of the talking and not listen to anyone else’s point of view? If you said yes to the above questions, then you are with me. If done right, the collaboration process works well, but if done wrong, people tend to not like it and will not enjoy the process.

We watched a video that was provided to us by our professor and I will say this, I thoroughly enjoyed listening to it. Margaret Heffernan talked about why it is important to forget the pecking order at work. MIT performed a study that groups volunteers together and gave them extremely hard problems to solve. They found that the best performing groups were not the groups that had the highest IQ’s. They found that three characteristics were prominent throughout the groups that performed superior. The first thing is that the groups showed a high degree of social sensitivity to each other. Second, the successful groups gave equal time for each member to contribute to the discussion. In my classroom, I have grouped my students according to ability level. I have paired an above-average student with an average and a below average student. The hopes were for the above average student to help pull up the below average student, but what I witnessed was not this. In fact, it was the average student that helped the below average student out more. I saw that the above average student was only worried about themselves, and did not show empathy towards the other two students. Often times, the above average student will ask to work by themselves. I use this as a teaching moment and try to get the above average student to understand the bigger picture. The third was that the more successful groups had more women in them. I chuckled at this, honestly. They were not sure if it was due to the fact that women show more empathy or if the women bring more diversity.

For collaboration to work well, remember all persons have a voice. No one dominates the conversation and no one is a passenger. Everyone contributes equally. Groups must have social cohesion. Let me hear from you about your thoughts on collaboration.