Collaborative pedagogy, a teaching approach grounded in Vygotsky’s sociocultural theories of learning, emphasizes the benefits of student collaboration in honing students’ higher order thinking skills. When students collaborate with their peers, they have the opportunity to uncover gaps in their knowledge, clarify misconceptions, as well as to develop reasoning and team-based skills (John-Steiner and Mahn, 1996). Collaborative learning activities can take various forms– problem solving in groups, peer instruction, and group discussion all of which present valuable opportunities for collaboration.

To create effective collaborative learning activities, instructors first need to determine appropriate group tasks. It is important to choose tasks that could not be easily accomplished by a single student since students can perceive team and group work as a hassle if the assigned task could be easily completed by an individual. To ensure a learning task is suitable for a group or team, make collaboration an explicit part of the learning goal. For example, review the sample learning goal from a mathematics course: Construct viable arguments for your process to find the solution and critique the reasoning of others. This learning goal is impossible for students to complete individually as it requires students to critique the reasoning of other students. Evaluation of this learning goal could involve asking students to write a reflection on their problem-solving process and the critique they receive from peers. 

Once you have your collaborative task, you will want to provide clear expectations so that students can hold themselves and their group members accountable. To encourage productive group work, many instructors assign roles, require groups to develop a group agreement, and check in regularly with each group. While these strategies can help an instructor promote healthy teams, how well students are collaborating with one another is hard to assess. To make student collaboration visible, consider requiring students to use collaborative workspaces, such as the applications available in Google Suite.

Shared Drive and Google Drive Folders

For long-term projects or projects requiring the organization of research, written tasks, and other forms of media, consider creating a Shared Drive for your course. Once you’ve added your students to the Shared Drive, both you and your students will have access to all materials in the drive. Students will be able to create group folders in the Shared Drive and store all of their work in these folders. If you do not want groups to have access to other groups’ folders, you can create group folders from your personal Google Drive and add each group member to the folders you create. This way, if a student leaves the group or class, you do not need to worry about losing access to the shared folder since you are the owner. For students, requiring that every group member store their work in a collaborative work space helps increase accountability and collaboration.

Google Documents

To facilitate collaborative writing, you can encourage students to use shared Google Documents. Google Documents can be easily shared with every member of a group. Students can comment on the work of another author and suggest edits without making permanent changes. If students are working in the document simultaneously, they can chat with one another using the integrated chat tool. In situations where one editor is taking notes or editing a group text, all contributors can see document edits in real-time. As the instructor, you can access the document’s version history to see the development of a piece of writing over time. Note that you need edit access to see the version history. These same features are available in Google Slides, making Slides an excellent tool for creating group presentations.

Google Slides and Google Sheets

Instructors can also manage whole class collaboration using Google tools. One example of this is to quickly divide a class into groups to discuss a single question. To capture each group discussion, one strategy is to share out a single Google Slide deck to the class, assigning each group one slide from the slide deck on which to record 5 key takeaways from their discussion. At the end of the activity, everyone in the class has access to the discussion content. Another way to involve all students quickly in a collaborative activity is to ask a question of the entire class and, using a Google Sheet, require each student to respond to the question in a specific cell on the Google Sheet. When students are done, they can easily scroll through the spreadsheet and read through the responses. If responses are longer, you can create multiple sheets on the same spreadsheet and give individual students access to their own Google sheet.