In Chapter 3 of Supporting Learning with Technology: Essentials of Classroom Practice there were numerous ideas on how we can utilize technology in order to further enhance the learning process.
One concept that stood out to me was the idea of collaboration versus cooperation. With collaboration, students draw upon their strengths, skills, and knowledge to engage in a discovery process and reach an end goal together. In the case of cooperation, students have unique roles in a structured task and bring their parts together to a specific end goal. There are benefits to both, but I would say that as an educator, my ideal would be to strive towards more learning experiences that center around collaboration. While cooperation would be more powerful in certain circumstances, I reflect upon my own education (such as with the LDT program at UGA) and think about those experiences that have been most rewarding and beneficial to me and I would say they would lean towards collaboration. While many of the projects we have completed have been independent, the time we spent together doing "desk crits", reviewing each others work, and more, was a much richer experience than times where I worked within a group and contributed a specific component that helped the group get towards its end goal or product.
I think about this in terms of my ability to impact student learning as an administrator, and how I can encourage teachers at my school to explore teaching with a focus on both collaboration and cooperation, and what the benefits are to each.
3 comments:
Sometimes with collaboration there does not need to be a plan or a specific activity. I notice my students collaborating and learning through social interaction everyday even with tasks like working on a worksheet. Whenever they ask each other questions and/or help each other figure out what to do they are engaged and learning. It is common knowledge that you learn the most about a topic when you teach it to someone else and I would be willing to bet that the students in your school are helping each other and teaching each other (thus facilitating their own learning) everyday.
I encourage collaboration in my classroom, but tech ed caters to that anyway. I love to hear students ask each other questions and figure out solutions together. Students truly learn from each other through social interaction. My main objective in my class is for students to leaders of their own learning. They do that a lot and don't even know it.
I’d like to share these following definitions as I think they defined the concept of collaboration and cooperation quite well.: Roschelle and Teasley (1995) state that “Cooperation is accomplished by the division of labor among participants, as an activity where each person is responsible for a portion of the problem solving. . .” while collaborative learning involves the “. . . mutual engagement of participants in a coordinated effort to solve the problem together” (p. 70). “Coordinated action lies at the heart of effective team performance" (MacMillan et al., 2004, p.63). I think both cooperation and collaboration are beneficial in learning. However, generally, it is not an easy work for generic learners to manage group work in agreement and to complete their joint task, so they need adequate support from teachers as a facilitator. Teachers could provide instructional comments, content-related feedback, social and emotional support, and feedback on learner’s misunderstandings. In addition, another important role is fostering students’ active participation and positive interaction and sustaining group management. I think teachers could help learners to not only coordinate group work but also give cognitive support and instructional guide.
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