This past semester, the TLTC convened a faculty roundtable to share strategies related to collaborative learning. After experiencing online and asynchronous learning environments over the past several years, students may need additional support learning to work together and to build community in the classroom. To promote cooperative and interactive learning, we can take purposeful approaches, making hidden expectations legible and creating positive structures for collaboration.

Our panelists—Andrea Fallon-Korb (Sport and Exercise Sciences), Miranda Kearney (Biology), and Sheena Mason (English)—talked about the ways that they invite students to collaborate and shared the benefits they see. Each scaffolds these activities, giving students tools to complete more sustained cooperative projects. Strategies include inviting students to establish expectations for collaboration, practicing how to share ideas and engage in critical exchange, making space for students to evaluate their own and others’ contributions, and brainstorming ideas together for a class goal. Students took up these practices on the way to conducting a research project together or planning and installing a gallery exhibit as a class.

View our session here.

Panelists also agreed to make some of resources available beyond the session. Below, you’ll find images from the gallery installation Professor Sheena Mason’s students created for a recent section of Writing About Literature. You can also access Professor Miranda Kearney’s supporting documents for the invasive species project she assigns in Ecological and Evolutionary Perspectives in Biology. Professor Kearney’s rubric, team contract, and contribution index empower students to hold each other accountable for engaged teamwork.