8.2: Getting Started

As you read, you may be tapping into your memories of group work—some of these memories may be positive, and some may be less so. Some of you may have some memories of collaboration that leave you wondering if it can really work at all; what if a group just can’t seem to get it together? How is it possible to make sure each group member carries an equal load? Others may have hopeful memories of a project or two that went well . . . maybe even really well. There was a motivation, a synergy, a collective feeling of pride among you. What we remember about our collaborative experiences can shape how we see collaboration now, so it’s useful to dig into those memories and reflect on them before you get started. Once we know why we see collaboration in certain ways, and once we share some of those stories, we can begin to create the kind of common ground that collaboration asks for.

Your Experiences Matter

Take some time to think through some of the collaborative work you’ve done in the past. Without worrying about mechanics or organization—spend fifteen minutes just writing about one or two experiences you’ve had. After you’ve spent some time writing, go back and re-read your freewrite, paying careful attention to the emotions you read in your words. Do you see inspiration? Anxiety? Pride? Frustration? Confidence? Confusion? What were the sources of these emotions in your experience? How do they shape the ways in which you view collaboration today?

Now, spend some time thinking about how those collaborations were set up. Specifically,

• What was the purpose of the collaboration?
• How was the group selected?
• How did you make creative and strategic decisions?
• How did you divide labor?
• If there were tensions, how did you resolve them?
• How did you maintain quality and integrity?

• In what ways did you offer praise to one another?
• How did you decide when the project was complete?

In my classroom, I often ask students at the beginning of a collaborative project to write about their experiences, and I have found that many of them measure the effectiveness of collaborative work according to those experiences. And why wouldn’t they? Experiences are powerful lenses, and they can help us to stay positive, as the one student who recalled, “Working in groups has worked well for me most of the time.” They can also make us more skeptical or even fearful of future collaborative experiences, as was the case with another student, who reflected, “I did my best to get out of them, and find a way to work alone. . . . Many times, it was one person pulling the weight of a whole group, and many times that was me.”

Rather than just labeling a collaborative experience “good” or “bad,” however, we can study the answers to these questions above and think more critically about how and why collaboration succeeds or fails. We can also take a more specific look at our own actions and tendencies for working in a group. Go back to that memorable collaboration, or even to other forms of group work that you’ve experienced, and ask yourself:

• What role did I play in that collaboration?
• More broadly, what role(s) do I tend to take in collaborative work? Why?
• How do I measure motivation and expectations of my group members?
• How do I measure fairness in dividing tasks?
• How do I measure success?
• How do I find the words to speak up when I want to challenge the group?

By looking at how a collaborative project was structured, and by examining our personal behavior in a collaborative situation, we can think more critically about how we might keep or change our approaches in future contexts.

Structuring the Path Ahead: Setting Up Your Project

Remember that Lennon and McCartney depended on their mutual respect, communication skills, and shared goals in their collaborative compositions. So, too, can you focus on these elements in your own collaborative work—the key is to build a structure that supports those components. Before you begin to research, design, and write your composition, prepare yourself and your group for the work ahead by considering three important steps to setting up your project: opening your mind, selecting group members, and articulating goals in a group contract.

Keep an Open Mind

Go back to the freewrite you composed about your experiences with collaboration, and re-acquaint yourself with the mindset you had about those experiences. Then look carefully once again at the ways in which that collaboration was structured. What would you change? What would you keep the same? Perhaps one of the most important approaches you can take to collaborative work is to keep an open mind; draw from your experiences, and be willing to learn something entirely new. Do not only assume that because a certain approach did or did not work in the past it will or will not work in the future. For example, though your group’s biology lab in your junior year of high school seemed to write itself, you may encounter new writing challenges now that you’re working with a brand new group of students. Likewise, though the senior year capstone collaborative project seemed dominated by the one student who struggled to incorporate others’ ideas, you may find that your group members in college are less willing to be silenced. A brand new collaborative situation offers you the opportunity to see yourself and your peers as credible sources of information. Each of you has something to offer, and whether your offerings coincide or clash, the valuable chance to learn from one another is there. If each group member pledges to allow for the thoughts and ideas of other members, you’ve gotten off to a promising start.

Selecting Group Members

A teacher will often invite students to decide how they want to be grouped in collaborative work. If this is the case, think carefully about this critical part of the project. Want to  work with your friends? Sometimes this is a great plan; after all, we often choose our friends based on common interests and views on the world. But consider the insight of teacher and scholar Rebecca Moore Howard. In her work on collaboration, Howard describes one collaborative assignment in which she explained to her students

that choosing their own groups would allow them maximum
comfort but would leave some students feeling unloved, and
. . . that the comfort of self-chosen groups could sometimes
result in poor decision-making, with too much consideration
for established relations and not enough for the collaborative
project. (64–65)

If you decide to work with your friends, it could be the best collaboration ever. But it could also put additional pressures on the friendships, which may detract from the tasks at hand. And what about those students who don’t have any close friends in the class? With these cautionary notes in mind, Howard’s students decided to be randomly grouped together. However you decide to group your project, go back to that “Keep an Open Mind” idea and consider how you might populate your group most effectively for the benefit of the class, the project, and your own development as a writer and student.

Establishing a Group Contract

Once you’ve established your group, there is an important step to take before you dive into the work, and in many ways it acts as your first collaborative writing activity: the group contract. This contract serves as a kind of group constitution: it lays out the collective goals and ground rules that will adhere group members to a core ethos for productive, healthy, creative work. It also gives you a map of where to begin and how to proceed as you divide the labor of the project. In composing your contract, consider the following issues.

• Understanding the project at hand. From the get-go, group
members should have a clear, shared understanding of what is
expected from your teacher. Engage in a discussion in which
you articulate to one another the goals of the project: what
is the composition supposed to accomplish? What should it
teach you as the authors? Discuss the parameters of the project:
form, length, design, voice, research expectations, creative
possibilities.

• Communication practices. Spend a few minutes discussing
together what “good communication” looks like. This conversation
may offer you a valuable opportunity to share some
experiences and get to know one another better. Once you
have outlined your standards for communication, establish
ground rules for communication so that your group fosters
sharp listening and makes space for a diversity of ideas and
perspectives. Will you meet regularly in person, or will you
rely on electronic means like email, chatting, a wiki, online
collaborative software like Google Docs, or Facebook? If you
use email, will you regularly include all group members on all
emails to keep everyone in the loop? How will you vote on an
idea? What if everyone agrees on a concept except one person?
What if tensions arise? Will you deal with them one-on-one?
In front of the whole group? Will you involve your teacher?
When and why?

• Meeting deadlines. Discuss your group members’ various
schedules, and establish a deadline for each component of
the project. Decide together how you will ensure that group
members adhere to deadlines, and how you will communicate
with and support one another in achieving these deadlines.

• Ethics. Discuss academic integrity and be sure that each
group member commits to ethical research and the critical
evaluation of sources. Each member should commit to checking
over the final product to be sure that sources are appropriately
documented. Rely on open, clear communication
throughout the process of research and documentation so that
you achieve accuracy and a shared understanding of how the
text was composed, fact-checked, and edited.

• Standards. Discuss together what “quality” and “success”
mean to each of you: is it an A? Is it a project that takes risks?
Is it consensus? Is it a collaborative process that is enjoyable?
Is it the making of friends in a working group? How will you
know when your product has reached your desired quality
and is ready to be submitted?

As you can see, this contract is not to be taken lightly: time and effort spent on a reliable contract are likely to save time and energy later. The contract acts as the spine of a group that is sensitive to differences of experience and opinion, and that aims to contribute to the intellectual growth of each of its members. While the contract should be unified by the time you’re done with it, allow space for group members to disagree about what is important—working with this disagreement will be good practice for you when it comes to composing the project itself. When it’s completed, be sure that each group member receives a copy of the contract. You should also give a copy to your teacher so that he/she has access in the event that you want your teacher to be involved in conflict resolution. Keep in mind, too, that the best contracts are used to define your responsibilities and enhance communication, not to hold over one another—your contract is a thoughtfully composed articulation of your goals, not a policing tool.