>To answer Tim Koschmann's questions. I'm talking about upper-division
>undergraduate classes. The classes are structured in various ways.
>All include lectures; some of the lectures are methodological, others
>explain the conceptual framework of the class, and others (mostly in
>the sociolinguistics class) are substantive expositions of the theory
>in the class readings. In the lectures I often say, I understand that
>this is probably all very abstract right now; try your best to understand
>it in this form and then don't worry because we'll be applying it to
>real cases pretty soon.
The reason I asked about the lecturing was that one of the things I found
when I used to teach in the CS department was that it was very difficult to
shift from giving lectures to a more participatory form of problem-solving
once I started lecturing. It was as though once the conversational roles
were established, it was very difficult to alter them. I was wondering
whether you had had similar experiences.
>About group work. I can't stand group projects. They are invariably
>a total hassle because of free-rider problems: the students I work with
>don't have enough solidarity to be able to count on one another to do
>their share. I keep remembering the group programming class at MIT, in
>which every group included a couple of students who flaked out, another
>average student, and a manically driven overachiever type who tried to
>do everyone's work and ended up going off the deep end. I think they
>moderated this course when one of these students finally jumped off a
>building. This latter, except for the jumping part, was always my own
>role in group projects when I was a student. So instead I structure the
>classes so that everyone is responsible for their own fate, but so that
>they're going to fail unless they learn how to get help from other people.
I wouldn't reduce "collaborative learning" to group work and certainly not
to the type of dysfunctional team project activity you describe. I would
consider any form of instruction that explicity utilizes fellow learners as
learning resources to be an instantiation of collaborative learning. It
would seem to me that the approach you describe using in your courses would
constitute "collaborative learning" in this sense.
I also don't think team projects are inherently bad. The original
motivation for introducing this kind of activity was to increase
authenticity, since professional practice so often requires working as a
part of a team. The problems you describe arise from a failure of the
teacher to support the students as they develop a system of accountability
within their groups.
---Tim