The Waterloo Collaboration and Teamwork Community of Practice offers a unique opportunity for instructors – as well as those who study collaboration and teamwork -- to connect with their peers to share examples, experiences, ideas, and best practices around collaboration, teamwork and group work in education.
This community of practice is part of a larger LITE-grant funded project on building collaborative capacity to teach students how to collaborate effectively, both within and across disciplines. Our plan is four-fold
- to conduct an environmental scan of existing expertise and resources at UW related to collaboration (this includes both teaching and scholarship),
- establish the community of practice where experts and instructors can share knowledge and ideas,
- identify and gather external resources that can help facilitate teaching students how to work well in a team, and
- disseminate these resources online and possibly via in-person workshops. We have an undergraduate Research Assistant from Knowledge Integration assisting with these activities.
The Waterloo Collaboration and Teamwork Community of Practice is co-organized by the Department of Knowledge Integration and Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE). For more information, please contact Scott Anderson (Centre for Teaching Excellence) and Katie Plaisance (Department of Knowledge Integration) at UWcollaborates@uwaterloo.ca
Using the links below, you can access the resources we have gathered to help facilitate teaching collaboration:
Collaboration and Group Skills - Quick Reference
- Describes best practices for group work.
- Describes team dynamics, stages of team-building.
- Provides tools for effective group work and meetings (roles, having an agenda, etc.).
- Describes the benefit of collaboration for students.
- Offers resources for further learning.
- Outlines, in depth, the description and purpose of a group charter.
- Offers guidelines for building a group charter.
- Techniques and best practices for brainstorming.
- Outlines best practices for giving/receiving feedback
- Sample handout for students to give feedback to peers.
- Defines mono-, multi-,inter-, and trans-disciplinarity.
- Offers examples of each.
- Best practices from Katie Plaisance's Making Collaboration Work course.
- Collective wisdom of the F19 INTEG 210 class
- Collated takeaways/themes from Katie Plaisance's Making Collaboration Work course.
Designing Group Work Worksheet (Past CoP Meeting Resource)
- Offers a framework to employ when designing group work in courses.
- Provides points to consider and guiding questions.
- We used this handout as a tool to facilitate discussion during a workshop.
List of Existing Collaboration and Teamwork Resources at UW (Updated 2020)
- Outlines documents/webpages (hyperlinked) with corresponding descriptions.
- Resources come from the CTE at UW (and beyond), and are categorized as follows: Working in a Group, Instructor Tools, Group Contracts, and Conflict Resolution.