Commonly Asked Questions about Teaching Collaborative Activities

How do I decide which assignments/activities to make collaborative? — A good rule of thumb is that if there's no reason for an activity to be collaborative, perhaps it shouldn't be. As you contemplate making a project collaborative, consider these questions: What is the objective or goal of this assignment or activity? How will that objective be furthered by asking students to work in groups? Is this project complex and challenging enough that it would be impossible for an individual student to complete it alone? Will this project require students to synthesize their work in true collaboration, rather than just complete work separately and turn it in together at the end? Collaborative activities, large or small, work best when they draw on the strengths of group interaction — for example, a rough draft workshop in a writing class allows each writer to receive comments from several different readers. In a more long-term collaborative project, such as an engineering senior design project, one of the objectives may be to teach students to draw on the skills and abilities of each member of a team. Engineering students, like students from nearly every discipline, need effective collaboration skills upon graduation if they are to enter the workplace successfully.