It is your first term studying business in college and you’ve managed to earn impressive grades. Now, your microeconomics teacher is announcing that that your final assignment, worth a large percentage of your grade, is going to be a group project. You scan the room, considering who you might team up with. Who do you trust to be an equal partner? Who would you enjoy working with? Who has valuable skills to help you earn a good score? Who might drop the ball, leaving you to complete most of the work on your own? Perhaps you are excited about forming a team to tackle a challenging assignment, or maybe you feel anxious at the prospect of coordinating responsibilities, resolving disagreements, and, perhaps, picking up teammates’ slack. Group work is common practice at all levels of education, and with good reason. Collaborative skills, such as creating action plans with a group, negotiating tasks and responsibilities, considering differing viewpoints, and compromising, are necessary in our communities and workplaces.

Teamwork and collaboration are frequently cited as valuable skills in the workplace and in educational environments. The National Association of Colleges and Employers’ (n.d.) Career Readiness Initiative identified teamwork as one of eight essential career readiness competencies. Collaborative assignments and projects are listed as high-impact practices by the American Association of Colleges and Universities' (n.d.). These teaching and learning practices offer "significant educational benefits for students who participate in them—including and especially those from demographic groups historically underserved by higher education" (American Association of Colleges and Universities, n.d., para. 1). Collaborative learning activities like group projects allow students to build deep understanding of concepts as they listen to diverse viewpoints, share ideas, and problem-solve in community.

Collaboration skills are not only important for students to build, but also a valuable way for them to learn. Group projects, like the one our microeconomics instructor has designed, offer tremendous opportunities to learn course content and develop valuable life skills. Unfortunately, many of us, and many of our students, can point to bad experiences working with groups. How can we help students navigate the challenges of working with others so they can gain the rich learning that group assignments can provide?

In Learning with Others (2022), Conrad and Lundberg advocate for colleges to become strong communities of learners where members take responsibility to learn “from, with, and for others in shared problem-solving that is focused on the pursuit of promising ideas for addressing real-world challenges and opportunities” (p. 31). This article tells the story of how faculty from two Seattle Colleges became a community of learners to understand (1) how we can help students build vital collaboration skills and (2) how we might increase the quality of group work so students have better experiences working in teams.

An Opportunity to Improve Collaboration Skills

Seattle Central College and South Seattle College are open-access colleges within the Seattle Colleges District. The colleges share some resources, a mission statement, and a strategic plan, but are separately accredited and have distinct, but similar, institutional learning outcomes and faculty-led assessment processes.  

In 2021-2022, the assessment committees at the two colleges noticed a similarity in the learning outcomes faculty chose to assess and the outcomes they chose not to assess. Seattle Central’s committee noted that few faculty documented their assessments of the institutional learning outcome centered on collaboration. Meanwhile, the assessment committee at South Seattle College found that faculty had documented few assessments of the college’s human relations outcome, an outcome focused on teamwork and collaboration. After seeing these results, faculty serving on the committees reflected on collaboration in their own courses and raised some challenging questions:

• What are our goals for group work? Are we asking students to work in groups to interact with course content or to build collaboration skills?
• Are we teaching students how to collaborate, or are we simply putting them into groups for projects?
• How do students learn collaboration skills? Do we develop these skills through experience or explicit instruction?
• What skills do you need to be a strong collaborator? How do we teach these skills?
• How are we assessing and grading group work? Do those grades reflect the group’s product, process, or both?
• Is it fair to assess, and grade, collaboration skills if we aren’t teaching them?

These initial discussions highlighted the need to improve our approaches to teaching and assessing collaboration skills. Assessment leads at the two colleges took the opportunity to build a multi-college, multidisciplinary group of faculty to learn more about the topic.

Learning With and From One Another

Fifteen faculty from diverse disciplinary backgrounds formed a learning community with the goals of learning how to teach collaboration skills and establishing guidance for assessing collaboration skills at our colleges. The group met regularly over six months to discuss articles and book chapters on teaching and assessing collaborative skills, share ideas, and create resources for the colleges. The learning community became a powerful model of the collaborations we hoped to foster in our classrooms. Group members established an environment of trust and respect as they worked toward their shared goals (Conrad & Lundberg, 2022).

South Seattle College Instructor John Darin prepares Northwest Wine
Academy students to work collaboratively in the wine industry

The learning community was comprised of faculty from different areas of the college, including English as a Second Language, college transfer disciplines, professional technical areas, and faculty counselors. Group members’ diverse backgrounds proved to be a tremendous strength as members shared from their wealth of expertise and experience. Faculty from different disciplines brought unique perspectives and ideas that expanded our understanding of strong classroom collaborations. For example, faculty in the Northwest Wine Academy at South Seattle College shared how they form and structure group projects to match how students can expect to work in the winemaking industry. Business faculty brought valuable insights about group process and dynamics, while a faculty counselor suggested ways to coach students through group conflicts. English as a Second Language teachers shared how cultural differences can influence group interactions and introduced the language needed to share opinions, disagree, and encourage participation from others. Working with colleagues across disciplines deepened our understanding of the skills needed to work well with others.

From our readings, the group learned that collaboration skills can be taught through explicit instruction, and that instruction in collaboration skills and teamwork leads to improved outcomes in group tasks (Lai et al., 2017). The group considered approaches for teaching collaboration skills and examined challenging aspects of assessing and grading students’ collaboration skills. Using discussion prompts from the Seattle Central College Black Solidarity Think Tank (2023), we considered the ways grading/assessing collaboration can harm students, and how we might disrupt and dismantle those harms. The group noted that teachers’ and students’ racialized and gendered biases around leadership behaviors and communication can render some students invisible in groups. Further, faculty risk privileging dominant cultural ways of knowing and being in teaching these skills, particularly when the behaviors we seek in group collaborations are not well-defined or agreed-upon.

As a result of these discussions, the team recommended a teaching approach in which instructors develop a strong classroom community, provide explicit instruction in collaborative skills, give students agency in how they form and structure their groups, and provide space for students to reflect on their experiences working with others.

Sharing Our Work: The Collaborate Toolkit

The learning community developed the Collaborate Toolkit, a resource to help faculty integrate effective instruction in teamwork and collaboration across the college (Seattle Central College, n.d.; South Seattle College, n.d.). Faculty noted that some areas of the college have considerably more time available to teach collaboration skills. Collaboration skills are key learning outcomes in some programs, and faculty in those areas prioritize teaching and reflecting on collaboration in their classrooms. Other areas in the college have less time to devote to these skills. Even so, the group agreed that there is value in students encountering similar approaches to collaboration instruction across the colleges. As one member said, “the goal is for all of us to be singing the same song. Some of us have the melody, and some of us have smaller, shorter parts, but we are singing the same song.” The Collaborate Toolkit was designed to introduce strategies, tools, and reflective practices that can be taught in some classes and reinforced in others.

The Collaborate Toolkit includes tips for teaching and assessing collaborative skills and a range of tools that can be adapted or used as is. The toolkit contains the following tips for teaching collaborative skills:

1. Create a strong classroom community. Satisfying collaborations occur in strong communities. The toolkit recommends that faculty spend time building community in their classrooms early on. A tool in the toolkit guides faculty and groups to cocreate group norms to ensure that group members have a shared understanding of how they will work together, communicate, and solve problems that arise.
2. Discuss the benefits of collaborative learning. Students don’t always love group work and may question its value. The toolbox recommends that teachers clearly communicate the learning goals of group projects. The Transparency in Learning and Teaching framework (Winkelmes, n.d.) is a useful way for faculty to build greater clarity in all assignments, and especially for group assignments.
3. Design effective group tasks and projects. Sometimes faculty create group assignments with the goal of fostering collaborative learning experiences and are surprised to find that students are not interacting as much as expected. The toolkit features a tool to help faculty think through how their group assignments are structured, including how students will need to interact, communicate, and make decisions in community.
4. Explicitly teach collaboration skills. Faculty can help students build collaborative skills by explicitly teaching strategies for working with others and coaching them as they practice their collaboration skills (Lai et al., 2017). One way to help students build these skills is to ask them to practice taking on various roles in their group interactions. The toolkit refers faculty to The POGIL Project’s (n.d.) role cards, which define roles individuals take in groups, describe each role’s responsibilities, and provide some language to use in group interactions.
5. Give students agency in group work. Faculty can ensure student agency in group work by allowing students to select their groups and encouraging groups to cocreate group norms to determine how they will work together. Another way to foster student agency is to ask students to select ways they personally hope to grow in their collaboration skills. For example, a student who tends not to speak up during group discussions may set a personal goal to share ideas more often in a group, while a student who often finds herself leading groups may focus on listening and incorporating others’ ideas and suggestions.
6. Encourage reflection. Students build strong collaborative skills by reflecting on their experiences working with others. We can encourage students to consider what strategies they used in a collaborative task, what went well in the collaboration, and how they might improve in the future. The toolkit provides two sample self-evaluation forms—one for an individual to reflect on their experiences working a group and another that guides groups to reflect together on their experiences.

The Collaborate Toolkit provides the following guidance regarding the assessment of collaborative skills:

1. Assess the process of collaboration. The product of a group assignment is important, but a group’s final product doesn’t necessarily indicate that group members worked well together. If our goal is for students to build collaborative skills, we need to assess the process of working together.
2. Ask students to reflect on their experiences. Instructors are encouraged to take an ungrading approach to assessing collaboration skills by focusing on providing narrative feedback to students rather than points (Stommel, 2021). Teachers have limited ability to observe a group as they negotiate, compromise, and handle conflicts, so students are best situated to assess their progress in building collaborative skills. Instructors can read students’ reflections and provide coaching and feedback in response. The toolkit cautions against assigning grades based on the content of student reflections; students need to know that their grades will not be hurt by their honest self-evaluations.

Bringing the Toolkit to Our College Communities

Faculty in the learning community implemented the Collaborate Toolkit’s ideas for teaching and assessing collaboration skills in 2023-2024. One instructor encouraged his biology students to reflect on how their collaborative skills grew across the quarter through the Collaborate Toolkit’s self-evaluation form. He was pleased to find that students reported high levels of collaboration skills attainment and a strong sense of self-accomplishment after working together in a group presentation. Another biology instructor found that the toolkit helped her bring collaboration into her class in a meaningful way without taking too much time away from her curriculum. The instructor engaged students in discussions about teamwork early each quarter to cocreate a collaboration skills rubric. Students used the rubric to assess their own and their partners’ collaboration skills after completing a series of lab assignments in teams. The instructor remarked that this practice encouraged students to regularly think about and practice collaboration skills, leading to improved performance in group assignments.

While faculty implemented the toolkit in their own courses, they also devoted themselves to sharing their ideas with their colleagues. The Collaborate Toolkit was published on the colleges’ websites and introduced to faculty in fall 2023. Since then, members of the original learning community have hosted information sessions about the toolkit and facilitated discussions about teaching collaboration skills. Seattle Central College’s employee development committee established collaboration as the theme for its quarterly Employee Development Days, hosting sessions on the Collaborate Toolkit as well as sessions on belonging, building community in face-to-face and online environments, and collaboration in online courses. These sessions sparked conversations and raised new questions, including the following: How can we help groups deal with less-committed teammates? What are some useful tools for collaborations in asynchronous online courses? What are some fair approaches to grading the product of group assignments? 

Next Steps

Group assignments are hard work for our students. Working with others means navigating differences of opinions and compromising, and students risk being let down by their teammates. Despite these challenges, it is important that students build these skills. The Collaborate Toolkit was created to help faculty teach and assess these skills effectively and improve students’ experiences working in groups. The conversations that began in our small learning community are now expanding to include more voices as we engage with our larger college communities. The Collaborate Toolkit is growing and changing as a result; new components and examples are being added to the toolkit as we continue to learn from one another. The toolkit is becoming a living set of tools that can be adopted and adapted widely.

Moving forward, we intend to continue sharing ideas so that students at our colleges will have more opportunities to learn and engage in meaningful teamwork. We also believe the original learning community's work can serve as a model for how we work with others in our communities. Through learning about collaboration in community, we experienced the deep satisfaction and sense of accomplishment that can come with working on teams. By sharing these practices, we aim to build professional communities where all members can experience teamwork in that way.

References

American Association of Colleges and Universities. (n.d.). High-impact practices. https://www.aacu.org/trending-topics/high-impact

Black Solidarity Think Tank. (2023, April). Framework of equity and care: Overview. Seattle Central College. https://seattlecentral.edu/sites/default/files/inline-files/BSTT-framework-overview_Spr23.pdf

Conrad, C., & Lundberg, T. (2022). Learning with others: Collaboration as a pathway to college student success. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lai, E. R., DiCerbo, K. E., & Foltz, P. (2017). Skills for today: What we know about teaching and assessing collaboration. Pearson.

POGIL. (2022). POGIL role cards. https://pogil.org/uploads/attachments/cj54ar2v7005flbx4u5cngrsm-pogillaminatedrolecards-final.pdf

Seattle Central College. (n.d.). The collaborate toolkit: A guide for teaching & assessing collaborative skills. https://seattlecentral.edu/about/institutional-effectiveness/collaborate-toolkit-guide-teaching-assessing-collaborative-skills

South Seattle College. (n.d.). The collaborate toolkit: A guide for teaching & assessing collaborative skills. https://southseattle.edu/assessing-learning-outcomes/human-relations

Stommel, J. (2021, June 11). Ungrading: An introduction. https://www.jessestommel.com/ungrading-an-introduction

National Association of Colleges and Employers. (n.d.). What is career readiness? https://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/career-readiness-defined

Winkelmes, M.-A. (n.d.). TILT higher ed examples and resources. TILT Higher Ed. https://tilthighered.com/tiltexamplesandresources

Lead image: Seattle Central College instructor Marina Halverson helps biology and oceanography students build strong collaboration skills

Emily Castillo is Director, Assessment, at Seattle Central College in Seattle, Washington.

Opinions expressed in Learning Abstracts are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the League for Innovation in the Community College