Collaboration in Pedagogy, part 2

Hello everyone,

I wrote my doctoral dissertation on collaboration in the arts. I'm fascinated by collaborative arts like theater, music, and film, and I came to realize that even a so-called individual art like writing is still highly collaborative.

Though I worked in the arts, I think I found some things in successful artistic collaborations that can pertain to education.

1. First of all, there needed to be a strong leader with an accurate vision of what the finished product should look like. In education this is the principal, true, but it is also department chairs, SLC coordinators, coaches, and other leaders. Ad hoc leaders may also emerge, but they usually need to be both encouraged and managed by the leader with the vision.

In the professional art world, money talks. If an artist does not conform to his leader, he is simply fired. In education, leaders must encourage, persuade, convince, and seek consensus; it is too easy for educational practitioners to shut the door and do what they want unless they are persuaded to do what the leader envisions.

The vision must be powerful and clear, and clearly understood by all.

2. Those who follow must be willing to do at least two seemingly contradictory things. On the one hand, they must function as leaders in the area of their expertise; they must give thorough input; they must create as if the entire project relies on them, or as if their contribution is the entire project; and they must not withhold any of their talents. On the other hand, they must be willing to sacrifice every contribution that does not conform to the overall vision of the project. (In successful musicals, for example, songs, dances, dialogue, and characters were all sacrificed when they did not contribute to the overall quality of the show. In unsuccessful, or less successful endeavors, individuals insisted on keeping their pet ideas even when the show suffered.)

This is one of the most difficult things in collaboration, this subsuming of the self into the collaborative effort. It does not mean that the self is diminished, it means that the self is secondary to the project.

3. Someone needs to decide when something is working or not. This may be the individual leader, but it's better when the entire group sees it and agrees.

4. Some things can only be done collaboratively. Education always involves a collaboration between teacher and student. That is, however, the equivalent of an actor working in front of an audience with no director. All actors know that a good director is indispensable. (On the other hand, a bad director is poison.) For educators, a good "director" is someone that will come into the class and watch the performance, and give an honest and accurate read of how the "performance" is going.

In comedy, this measurement is easy. Either something is making the audience laugh or it isn't. If it doesn't succeed in being funny or building to a good gag, then it's jettisoned. Whether or not something works in the classroom is partly determined by assessment, partly by the teacher's own sense of relative success or failure, and partly by what outsiders say. (Student evaluations of the teacher are helpful if the students can be relied upon to give accurate evaluations.) Trusted outsiders may give accurate assessments.

5. Some things improve with collaboration. I think education is one of them.

Jeff Combe