Cheating or Collaboration

“We are not cheating, we are working together!”  This was a statement of a student who was accused of cheating at my school.  Just by walking by, I don't believe anyone could assess whether or not cheating or collaboration were occurring.

If as adults, we collaborate on most or all of our tasks in life, why do we require our students to work alone?  We should be promoting collaboration in our schools and not independence or even cooperation.  I have written about the difference between cooperation and collaboration here.

If you are truly worried about cheating in your class, here are easy and simple solutions to prevent it from happening:

·         Create open ended projects which allow the students to create and use autonomous strategies.  Once the “group” has decided on a certain path to take, students will want to be more accountable without extrinsic motivators.  Have these projects relate directly to the students’ lives through their passions or interests.  Once the student understands that it is a worthwhile problem, he/she will have more motivation to also understand how to solve it.

·         Have these tasks as low risk tasks.  This can be done by not assigning any marks to the project.  Put the emphasis on the work done, the learning achieved, and the final project presented, not on the mark given to the group.

·         If you are giving marks, have the students actively involved in the mark.  Ask them to evaluate themselves; listing both strengths and weaknesses of the completed project.  Allow for students to improve the mark by giving them comments (without marks at this point) as to what areas are needed for improvement.

The common argument to letting students collaborate on a project is: “The teacher won’t actually know how much each person knows.”  I am still not convinced that this statement is true.  I believe if you give students a well thought out collaboration project, students will learn the intended outcomes. 

Teachers need to stop the requirement of marks and start looking more at a holistic idea of whether or not students understand the intended outcome.  I agree that teachers will not know the EXACT mark (ie: 92.5%) of a student through a collaborative project BUT….. Neither will they know it through a test!  Great teachers understand how poor and inaccurate test scores are to demonstrate how much learning has occurred. 

Once, as an entire education system, we embrace the idea of not needing marks to assess students you will see how a collaborative project is a more effective tool than an individual traditional test.

Collaboration first, cooperation second.

Just recently, I have understood the true difference between collaboration and cooperation. According to Dictionary.com collaboration and cooperation are defined as:

Collaboration - something created by working jointly with another or others.

Cooperation - an act or instance of working or acting together for a common purpose or benefit; joint action.

I attended an association instructor's training where we dug deeper into these words. If I wrote this blog a year ago, I would have written that these words are synonyms of each other. I would have continued with stories that, in my classes, students are truly collaborating with each other throughout their learning. I would have been lying.

Cooperation was, and still is, present in my teaching. I have my students sit in groups and always allow them to "act together for a common purpose". However, this is different than "creating [something] by working jointly with another". An example that can differentiate the terms would be an assembly line at a car factory. The workers are working together to finish a project (the car), however the workers are not sharing ideas, or working jointly with another to finish the task.

I have taken this point back to my class and now, I have my students truly collaborating with each other. Students must rely on the knowledge of each group member to solve a problem. One strategy I have implemented, to allow for true collaboration to occur, is if a student is not understanding a certain task, or is uncertain of a step, he/she must ask his/her group members for assistance. Once assistance is given, he/she must be able to explain the reasoning he/she was taught, before moving on in the problem. I truly have noticed a change in the dynamics of my classroom.

Before this change occurred, students preferred to work with others that share their same level of knowledge and calibre. If a weaker student was present in the group, they would leave the student behind, to watch from the "sidelines". Now, with true collaboration occurring, students embrace the weaker ones and truly assist them in their learning. No longer are students left behind, but instead picked up and helped along. Two amazing ideas are being created in my classes.

1) Most students are feeling a sense of ownership for their learning. They are not afraid to take chances, and are becoming more responsible for their knowledge.


2) Students are becoming teachers. When a group member is confused on a certain outcome, the group will stop and teach the idea to the other member.

I have now realized that if you have collaboration then you must have cooperation, however the converse may not necessarily be true. Knowing this, I put collaboration first and therefore am guaranteed to have cooperation.