Issues to Consider and Decisions to Make When Using Cooperative or Collaborative Assignments

Kathleen McKinney, Cross Chair in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and Professor of Sociology
Illinois State University

1. What are the learning and other outcomes you hope the cooperative or collaborative work will help your students achieve? (If you cannot answer this question, you should rethink doing the group work!).
2. How can you best structure the cooperative or collaborative assignment or task to achieve these student-learning outcomes?
3. How will you "prepare" students for this work (clarify purposes, provide clear, written expectations, overcoming student resistance, offering training/help with group conflict or group processes…)?
4. How will you deal with your own doubts (about covering content? Or loss of control? Or insufficient knowledge of groups?)?
5. How should you assist with forming or assigning the students to groups? (size? Homogeneous or heterogeneous? Self-select or random or teacher assigned?)
6. Is the work short or long term?
7. If the group work involves multiple task or assignments, should students stay in the same group or change groups?
8. If the task in cooperative, how is there positive interdependence?
9. How formal or informal should the group work be?
10. How should the groups be structured? Should students have roles? How will labor be divided?
11. Should you, and how, help students find times and places to meet? (e.g., use some in-class time, encourage virtual meetings, provide a class roster…)
12. How will you and your students deal with "free riders"?
13. How will you hold students individually accountable?
14. How will you and your students deal with group conflict?
15. How can you increase group cohesion and student engagement?
16. How will students be evaluated? (Products? Process? Teacher? Self? Peer? Group and/or individual grades?)
17. Should (and how will) you get student feedback on the benefits and problems with the assignment/work?
18. Other?