Lessons on Collaborative Learning from the Traffic in Beijing

In Beijing everyone on the roads appears to drive exactly where they like.

Eccentrically overloaded trucks, bicycles, cars, buses, coaches, and pedestrians, move in individual defiance of any externally imposed controls, street markings, lights or traffic signals. Two lanes marked become three or four lanes driven, horns sound loudly as vehicles from any direction enter the drive space that you imagine is yours, and simple understandings of left and right are dismissed for reckless games of chicken run down the center when traffic becomes congested   

The anarchy evident in traffic flows meant we crossed roads hesitantly, unable to determine where the next hazard was coming from.  Even on marked crossings we moving in synchrony with the locals, knotted together like a group of South Island trampers attempting to cross a river in Fiordland.   And this seemingly rampant driver independence saw us playing “rock scissors and paper” for the back seats on any taxi trips.

Beijing’s traffic accident and pedestrian death statistics are legendary.  And yet something in the interaction of vehicles defied a true sense of randomness. Individual drivers in Beijing were highly alert and highly skilled. They seemed to avoid each other by some unidentified shared understanding, some collective knowing, some unexplained collaboration. How can a sense of collaboration come from something so individual? 

I didn’t really understand this until the ICCE 2006 conference started and I heard collaboration talked about in quite a different way to what I am used to in New Zealand.   

We are very keen on “collaborative learning” in New Zealand schools.  “Group work” has a religious following with teachers – so much so that special concessions are often needed for the individual to work alone.

In New Zealand schools collaboration is all about “convergence” – students working together, sharing tasks and ideas to construct new group understandings.

In a traffic flow analogy, the design of the collaborative inquiry based learning experiences in New Zealand sees the learner following all the rules of the road, carried along in the traffic flow, unable to go slower or faster, unable to change lanes, synchronised in the convergence of the collective learning outcomes of the group activity. 

Why are we so keen on collaboration? – When you look critically at the design of many inquiry tasks there is often no real advantage, no real need for collaboration. Is our desire for collaboration simply social engineering – it is because we believe students need to learn how to share and work together? When collaboration is reduced to social compromise how do we know if it improves student learning outcomes? 

It was a keynote by Naomi Miyake from Chukyo University Japan, that challenged me to look again at collaboration.  Her presentation on “Designed Collaboration as a Scaffold for Schematic Knowledge Integration” showed that EFFECTIVE COLLABORATION is not about CONVERGENCE

Six years of research using various forms of the Jigsaw matrix methods for collaboration, and concept mapping tools to support collaborative reflection showed retention of learning 4 to 6 months after the end of the course, explicit knowledge integration surrounding each students personal needs and some conscious learning of thinking and learning skills.

But for collaboration to be effective,

“the learning environment must allow the novice to express their own ideas, have an opportunity to compare their own ideas, with the ideas of others, and be able to modify their own ideas as well as expanding them.” 

It seems that in designing for collaboration, it is the “differences in opinion” rather than convergence thinking that leads to discussion and progress in an individual’s learning.

I guess that my next challenge is to look again at how we design collaborative inquiry in New Zealand and find ways to reintroduce the individual.  I want to build opportunities to make each students’ understandings visible (externalised) and to allow these understandings to be compared with and challenged by others, and see if I can duplicate the research results of Naomi Miyake’s team in New Zealand classrooms .