At Eduflow, we believe collaborative learning is the key to better learning. Collaborative learning applies to many situations where people learn together, from synchronous, in-person classroom settings to informal collaboration and everything in between.
Because collaborative learning covers such a broad spectrum of learning opportunities, you can’t use a one-size-fits-all approach to promote collaborative learning at your company.
That’s why we’ve developed the PAIR Framework.
The PAIR Framework is a collection of four research-backed strategies, or “engines,” to help you drive collaborative learning at your workplace. It’s inspired by research in cooperative learning by Spencer Kagan and David and Roger Johnson.
Engine 1: Presence
Learners feel like they are part of a community and are able to interact with each other while focusing on a similar goal.
Engine 2: Accountability
Learners contribute to the learning experience — especially if it is for the greater good of the learning community.
Engine 3: Inclusion
Learners are able to participate and feel that their participation is valued in the learning community.
Engine 4: Reliance
Learners feel like they depend on each other to succeed with their learning goals.
All four engines are important, but they aren’t all necessary (or even useful) in the same way in every situation. Using presence to make learners feel like part of a community will look different in a live workshop than it will in an asynchronous online discussion, for example.
Use the PAIR Framework as a jumping off point to think about different strategies that you can use to build a culture of collaborative learning at your workplace. You don’t have to force yourself to turn on every engine in every learning situation.
Imagine you have the option of going to one of two identical pubs to watch the FIFA World Cup. One is empty, and the other is full of fans decked out in your team’s colors. It’s safe to say that most people would choose the busy pub — half the fun of watching the game is getting swept up in the excitement of the crowd.
That feeling is the power of presence, of sharing a space and an experience together. It gives people the opportunity to interact, and it helps create a shared sense of purpose, whether you’re in a bar watching a football match or in a classroom tackling a new concept. The research agrees: Experiences are more intense when they’re shared.
Presence is what allows a community to form, and communities are essential for collaborative learning. The problem is, you can’t force community. You can only build an infrastructure that fosters presence, where community has a chance to form.
Find out why we think community beats content when it comes to learning.
For in-person learning presence is easy to achieve, because people are already sharing a space. In online settings, creating that sense of togetherness that allows community to form is trickier.
Strategies to encourage presence
Create opportunities for interactions
Build the infrastructure for learners to interact. This might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s surprising how uncommon discussion features are in online learning. Try to design an experience that gives learners an opportunity to interact with one another via discussion forums, instant messages, or Zoom breakout rooms.
Show learners they aren’t alone
Social media sites like Slack and Facebook have clever features that reinforce a feeling of presence online. They show someone is online and when they are typing a message, for example.
Think about ways you can remind your learners that they’re sharing a journey with others. One tactic is to encourage each learner to introduce themselves to the group, or require that each learner interact with what other students post.
Read about how Eduflow customer Animalz helped new hires feel less alone during onboarding.
Give learners a shared goal or focus
A shared focus connects communities. As an example, let’s look at Wordle, the simple word game whose popularity exploded on Twitter. A new five-letter puzzle is released each day, and all Wordle players work to solve the same puzzle within the same 24-hour timeframe and share their results online. Users who play the game are in an informal ‘cohort' who share their success and encourage each other.
Like Wordle, you can use time limits and shared assignments to give learners a common goal.
Make your learning experience accessible
If learners can’t access your course, they can’t participate. It's important to remove barriers to make your experience accessible to anyone who wants to participate. Examples include closed captions, adherence to WCAG standards, and alternative text for images. And try to offer an online option for in-person events so that people with mobility issues can still attend.
Find out how to add closed captions to videos in Eduflow.
Does your course encourage presence? Ask the following questions:
- Do learners know that they are learning with others?
- Are learners able to interact with each other?
- Do the learners share a similar focus?
- Is my course accessible to my audience?
Too many sports teams have players who sit on the bench game after game. These benchwarmers don’t contribute anything to the play. But if the team wins, they get a share of the glory.
I’m sure a lot of us have memories of group projects in school that felt the same way–one or two students did all of the work, only for the benchwarmers who didn’t participate to share the credit–or even worse, took the glory for themselves.
So, how do you encourage the benchwarmers to get involved and make sure that everyone participates in the learning experience?
Simple. You get rid of the bench.
Accountability means that each student is responsible for their own learning, and they are responsible for contributing to the group’s learning experience. When you remove the benches, you give each participant a purpose and make them accountable for their own contributions–whether that’s by assigning specific sections of a larger project to individual learners or giving each student a specific role within the learning experience, for example.
The idea should be for participants to “learn together but perform alone.”
Accountability isn’t useful in all situations, however. If you’re creating a company wiki, it doesn’t make sense to build accountability into your project. The goal is to create a valuable shared resource, not rate individual contributions.
Accountability strategies are most useful for cooperative learning in both synchronous and asynchronous structured learning scenarios.
Strategies to encourage accountability
Use cooperative learning techniques
Existing cooperative learning exercises like think-pair-share, jigsaws, and peer reviews are great tools to use because they often have accountability built into their structure. In jigsaw exercises, for example, each learner is responsible for one piece of the project, which all come together to form a whole. If a learner fails to complete their piece of the puzzle, the whole group is held back. Each learner is accountable for their contribution to the group.
Set completion and participation requirements
When an instructor makes assignments mandatory and sets clear consequences for failing to meet those requirements, they are pushing learners to be accountable for their own learning. If you set participation requirements like commenting on other students’ discussion posts or contributing to group discussions, you help make learners accountable to the group.
Does your course encourage accountability? Ask the following questions:
- Do students have specific outputs that they are personally responsible for?
- What kind of group learning exercises am I using?
- Are students encouraged to participate and contribute to the group?
Every situation has power dynamics built into it, whether we acknowledge them or not. If members of the C-suite collaborate on a project with more junior members of the company, for example; those junior employees might feel too intimidated to speak up, even if they have a good idea to contribute to the project. But if you actively work to make the most junior members of the team feel included and valued, they are much more likely to contribute.
When you prioritize inclusion, learners feel safe to participate and comfortable enough to make mistakes without worrying about being judged.
As we mentioned before, some engines are only valuable in certain learning situations. Inclusion is an engine that should always be running. Without it, the whole learning experience falls apart.
Inclusion doesn’t happen on its own: power dynamics and biases are present in pretty much every human interaction, and the only way to counteract them is to intentionally and explicitly build a learning experience that fosters inclusion, from the start. Plus, it can be harder for people to feel inclusion online, where people often have a harder time reading tone, and building relationships often takes more effort.
Strategies to encourage inclusion
Build an inclusive framework from the start
You build inclusion into a learning experience from the ground up–it’s not something that can be added in as an afterthought later. Set the standards from the beginning. Create clear guidelines and a code of conduct for your learning community. Make sure those guidelines are spelled out explicitly, and that there are clear, escalating consequences for breaking the rules.
Representation matters
For a learning environment to be inclusive, representation matters. Be intentional about hiring instructors with diverse backgrounds. If your teaching materials use characters or illustrations, choose materials with a wide range of characters represented.
Does your course encourage inclusion? Ask the following questions:
- Does my learning community have a code of conduct?
- Is there a clear process in place to make sure participants respect the code of conduct, and consequences if they don’t?
- Do people feel comfortable participating?
Think of collaborative learning like a seesaw: it doesn’t work with just one person sitting there and waiting for something to happen. Each player needs to push the seesaw up when their side hits the ground, or they’ll both be stuck.
Each player relies on the other’s participation in order for the game to work.
Collaborative learning is similar. For it to work, learners need to be able to depend on each other to succeed with their learning goals.
Reliance and accountability strategies go hand in hand. Accountability means everyone is contributing to the learning experience, and reliance means that you can count on the participation of others’ and trust their contribution.
When you put frameworks for both accountability and reliance in place, learners feel a group sense of responsibility for their learning experience: no individual can succeed on their own unless the group succeeds as well. When learners collaborate and help each other succeed, they build the connections and trust that enrich the learning experience.
Like accountability, reliance is more important in structured learning contexts–it’s useful for classrooms or online courses, but less helpful in informal learning situations like casual brainstorming.
Strategies to encourage reliance
Create positive interdependence
Reliance could also be called positive interdependence. In their 1994 textbook The New Circles of Learning: Cooperation in the Classroom and School, siblings David Johnson, Roger Johnson, and Edythe Johnson Holubec talk about the different forms of positive interdependence that help promote collaborative learning:
- Positive goal interdependence: Each participant can achieve their learning goals only if all group members do. Think of a choir learning a new song — the performance can only be successful for all if everyone knows their lines and hits their notes.
- Positive reward interdependence: Each member receives a reward if the group achieves their goals. If the choir memorizes its song and gives a stellar performance, the choir director will treat them all to ice cream.
- Positive resource interdependence: The resources to complete the task are distributed among the members of the group. Learners need to pool their resources to complete the task.
- Positive role interdependence: Each learner has a different and complementary role, so each has a specific piece to contribute to the whole. In a choir, that could be sopranos, tenors and baritones singing together. Each has a specific role that only they can contribute.
Does your course encourage reliance? Ask the following questions:
- Do individuals need the help of others to succeed?
- Can learners complete the exercise alone?
Different strategies for every situation
The PAIR framework is designed to help you promote collaborative learning practices at your workplace. But as we mentioned above, not every engine will be useful (or even relevant) for every situation.
There is no one single strategy that will make sense in every situation. That’s why we encourage you to think of PAIR as a collection of strategies that you can deploy when they’re useful, rather than a rigid set of rules.
Want to learn more about the PAIR Framework and collaborative learning? Join our free course:
William Cronje | Instructional Designer & Program Manager at Eduflow Academy
Cassandra Naji | EdTech Marketer & Director of L&D
