stories about teaching & learning

Jake Blanchard - Group Problem Solving

Professor of Engineering Physics
College of Engineering
Due to industry demand for graduates that can work together in teams, collaboration is done throughout an Engineering student's academic career. In their first engineering class, undergraduates work together in groups to design and build engineering solutions to problems encountered by various Madison residents and corporations. Students work in both small (3-4) and large (12-14) groups to brainstorm design ideas, compare proposed solutions, build and test protypes, and carry out design modifications. Helping students learn to carry out these tasks as members of a team prepares them for their engineering careers. Jake Blanchard says:

"We hope that our students will learn to work in a group, which has become an integral part of being an engineer. We also hope to give them a sense of what it is like to be an engineer, in order to improve retention of those initially interested in engineering but often turned off by traditional preparatory courses."

Grading team projects is done by looking at each group's design documentation, individual student lab notebooks, and peer assessment provided by each team member. Blanchard finds that if a student is not contributing a fair share of the workload, it is readily apparent in the peer assessments.

 

Randy Dunham - Group Problem Solving

Professor in Management and Human Resources
Business School
Randy Dunham uses collaboration projects with both his MBA and upper-level undergraduate students. His working MBA students work for an entire semester on a consultation project with a group member's company. They must work together to write a contract with the company, to work with members of that company to research the problem, and to prepare a written report and class presentation. A loosely defined assignment with specific work products is an task common in business settings. Dunham says that his goal is to:

"Provide a laboratory where students can learn to be, or not to be, effective as a member of a team. In each of my classes I talk about developing effective teams at different stages—how teams have different needs when they're brand new versus when they're mature. One of my goals is process. It's to help them learn to be more effective team members and to manage teams better."

To assess performance, Dunham has students rate their teammates' performance twice in the course of the project and assigns final grades based on a set of dimensions or rubric.

 

Greg Downey - Collaborative Writing

Associate Professor
Journalism, Library & Information Studies
Greg Downey assigns his students to contribute to a timeline of library history. Because students choose the historical moments to which they contribute, he hopes to demonstrate that anyone has the power to define history in the process of knowledge production. Downey offers this advice about motivating students to do good group work:

"One thing I find that is really crucial to group projects is to provide really clear expectations of what you want the students to be able to come up with and why they are doing it. [My students] know that I want them to come up with something interesting and creative, and that makes a claim about this wider historical process. Students were mostly very excited about that, and thought it was cool and bought into that."

When all of this work is put together, a shared repository of information emerges; this brings a possibility that students might start building on one another's work.

 

 

Alfonso Morales - Student Reflection

Visiting Assistant Professor
Sociology
Alfonso Morales wanted his students to enrich their learning by engaging each other on the subjects they found interesting or useful by drawing upon previous course work, opinion or life experience. Using an onlinecourse portfolio developed by L&S Learning Support Services, his students posted materials they thought would be of interest to one another. These materials grew over the course of the semester as students provided new materials from which to learn.

"Now sometimes a student or students posted something provocative. Perhaps it was a group summary of a reading, perhaps notes from a lecture, perhaps a reaction to something in the popular press. When this happened, dialog emerged and several students addressed the matter. Pedagogically, this was exciting because they posted things to learn from AND they learned about what they thought from responding to each other."

The emphasis on writing and discussing forced all of the students to think and reflect on the material and how it relates to both the course and what is going on in the world. He says, "I believe that students will learn best by writing and so I encouraged posting as an opportunity to think about ideas."

UW Madison Collaborative Examples and Articles

Putting Together Peer Review Groups
Some guidelines for putting together peer review groups.

A Collaborative Paper in Geography. Susy Ziegler
In this assignment, Susy Ziegler sets up the process and explains the requirements for a collaborative paper. Note particularly her suggestion that each group member be responsible for one part of the paper and that all group members work together to compose the introduction.

How Do You Make Peer Review Work? Kirsten Jamsen
After many semesters using peer review in her class and helping colleagues across campus use peer review successfully, she has developed sevearl specific suggestions for instructors trying peer review for the first time.

A Collaborative Term Project in Consumer Science. Irene Vida
Professor Vide explains the requirements for a group term paper and presentation. To evaluate the collaborative process, she asks students to report back on the contributions of each group member to the final project.

Team Poster for the Genetic Linkage Project. Ann Burgess
This Biocore assignment encourages collaborative learning by putting students in teams and encouraging peer review to evaluate final products.

Anticipating the Challenges of Peer Review. Katie Green Beilfus
Katie reviews a number of the challenges of different types of peer review and makes suggestions for overcoming some of the most common difficulties.

 

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