|Mary Reid, PhD|
"The Seven Ps" for Elevating Collaboration Skills
The classroom is fundamentally a collaborative enterprise, so it stands to reason that elevating classroom collaboration to a high level will engender learning. Success in collaboration will also help students transition successfully from the classroom to a professional career where the ability to work effectively with others can be paramount. To that end, I thought it would be valuable here to explore skills known as the “seven norms for collaborative work” (Bill Baker, Group Dynamics Associates, Berkeley) and to think about their relationship to classroom experiences.
I am a relative newcomer to this skill list, but the relevance of these norms to our experiences as teachers and learners is immediately obvious. You can incorporate these approaches in your role as a leader of classroom activities, but you also can employ them as you supervise students in their group work. By adopting these norms as a graduate teaching assistant, I think you’ll find that you have acquired valuable skills for both your professional career and your day-to-day interactions with others.
Despite its simplicity, pausing is surprisingly powerful. It lets students know that you are serious about learning (theirs and yours), that you want students to listen and weigh each others’ thoughts, and that you are sufficiently confident in your role as a teacher that you don’t feel the need to fill up the sound vacuum. Besides literally incorporating moments of silence (whether or not preceded by a question), pausing can take other forms, such as asking students not to blurt out answers so that others can have the opportunity to contribute or having students write down questions/answers before opening the floor to them.
Two examples of how you might start paraphrases are “It sounds like you’re saying…” or “You’re thinking that….” To engage students in practicing paraphrasing and to help students value their own words, you can ask them to put another’s response into their own words: "Can you say that another way?" "How does what you said fit with what X said?" The paraphrase communicates how important it is in collaborative learning activities to hear and understand what’s been said. It also helps to model forms of expression appropriate to the discipline and lessens students’ frustration at misunderstanding.
As with paraphrasing, try letting fellow students take the initiative to probe. In this way, you not only help students build valuable, discipline-specific communication skills, you also build trust and a sense of inclusion among students through collective engagement in understanding. Phrases to initiate probing include “Please say more” and “Then, are you saying…?”
4. Put ideas on the table
5-7. Pay attention, Presume the positive, and Pursue a balance
To minimize misunderstandings and hurt feelings and to promote productive interactions and teamwork, assume that comments, questions, or statements are coming from a positive place; carrying a negative view of students or other team members shows. Sentence stems for promoting positive interactions include “I appreciate what you are saying because…” and “What you are saying makes sense because….”
Finally, it is important throughout the collaborative learning process to balance one’s desire to promote a position (advocate) against the value of regularly questioning that position (inquiry). Advocacy leads to decision-making and problem resolution, but don’t rush it—or let it be rushed— at the expense of the greater understanding that inquiry can provide.
I’d like to close this article by linking the foregoing norms of collaboration to skills often identified as important for success in the professional world. If you think about what these norms promote, you’ll be able to identify respect, effective verbal communication, critical thinking, initiative, and leadership. When considered in this light, adoption of these norms in your teaching will not just advance discipline-specific learning, but also will prepare you and your students for the world beyond the classroom.
—Mary Reid, Professor and Program Chair, Geology, and NAU President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow