0.2 Structural challenges  (Page 2/2)

Collaboration

While community is about providing the opportunities for students to learn about each other, interact, and form lasting team relationships, collaboration is about teaching each team member how to be individually productive.

In the classroom, there are many collaboration tools, a few of which were mentioned above (eg. TPS and PBL) which may be used to provide the students the opportunity to work cooperatively. Along with these techniques, the students should be provided with the roles in which each might serve to keep the team on task. It often serves well to have one student serve the more technical role (driver) and the other a more managerial role (navigator...or perhaps devil's advocate). Some tasks of fairly low technical difficulty should be interspersed to provide multiple team members an opportunity to change roles.

Outside the classroom, there are other tools to allow for productive collaboration. Using a course WIKI to complete a project would allow for different members of the team to provide varying methods of participation within a project. A less technical team member could be in charge of initiating the web page, populating it with "standard materials" like the title, goal, and methods to be used in the project and even initiating a journal for tracking the progress of the project. Another team member may be responsible for writing up the technical aspects of the project while a third member verifies that the explanation is complete yet simple.

Accountability (old school 'countability? )

Community and Collaboration provide the opportunity and structure for working as a team. Accountability ensures that they do so each time they are asked to do so. Of course accountability is provided when students are expected to perform well on course assessments like exams, homework and laboratory assignments, but they should also be expected to be accountable for their day-to-day performance in lecture, especially as it pertains to community and collaboration and all aspects of Diversity Harnessing.

One answer is not to have a team present an entire solution, but rather have multiple teams offer portion of the solution consecutively. Another idea would be to call upon different teams to present a summary of their solutions...being careful to have them prepare the summary first and present it to you rather than allowing them to say, "Yeah, that's what I had too." Another possibility is to not present any solution, but have the teams all hand them in and allow you to choose a solution from among them while providing a grade to each team based on EFFORT!

Automatic accountability: two steps forward, one step back?

Having the written portion of the weekly assignment based on the DHQ provided accountability for myself! It requires quick turn around on each week's Diversity Harnessing questionnaire in order to be prepared to write and post an assignment based on that material.