It could be that it was Thursday, the first class of the morning. It could be that it was freezing outside. It could be the fact that I teach seniors. But last month when I divided students into groups with three discussion questions and gave them fifteen minutes to collaborate I got the last thing I expected from this incredibly energetic group: silence.
At first I worried they misunderstood the directions. “You know you can work together on these, right?” I gently prompted.
“We are,” one student retorted, pointing at the multiple cursors blinking on his google doc. Once he saw another member of the group typing on the section he was on, he quickly moved down to an unoccupied question to add his two cents.
At the end of the allotted time, every group had finished the challenge with a decent quality of answers. Still no one had said a word.
“What was that?!” I asked as we prepared to share out. “Were you all just tired or being efficient or do you actually prefer to collaborate that way?”
“Since Covid, I think we all learned this was a better way to work together in a group,” one student offered.
“But is dividing and conquering a google doc the same as collaborating on a google doc?” I asked.
The students shrugged. One mumbled something to the effect of, “If we had done this by hand on one single physical copy, likely one person would dominate all of the answers. At least this way all of us contributed something.”
I thought back to my last collaborative manuscript. While we talked together about the overarching argument of the piece, we quickly and early jumped to division of labor (you do the lit review, I’ll do the methods section, he can do the findings). Truly writing collaboratively can be a miserable enterprise. The real collaboration prefaced the doing of the writing, and then it followed the first draft when we looked across all of our contributions to smooth it into one coherent piece.
As usual, I’m left with questions rather than answers:
- Does collaboration mean what I think it is? How central is talk to that process?
- What are my main goals with group work?
- How can I better set up expectations for the kind of group work I think will best serve these goals?
- To what extent is technology the bad guy here? To what extent is it the good guy?
The following Monday class, everyone was back to their very talkative, very loud selves. During a think-pair-share I couldn’t get students to silently write first so I gave up and let them talk with a partner first instead. I found myself thinking back to the previous baffling class with nostalgia: “Why was I so worried about silence?! That was a GIFT!” 🙂
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