Collective Learning

We don’t need to judge people to help them learn.

True, we are vested almost to obsession in weighing, measuring and judging individual students. It’s hard to imagine an education system without tests, assignments and individual grades. But let’s try.

Individual vs Collective Learning

In military training at the Canadian Forces the focus is not on individual performance but rather what they call collective training. They are interested in how well teams achieve their objectives, and the focus in what they call the ‘after action review’ is on how to make the team more capable, not in evaluating how well each person performed.

Similarly, when air crash investigators look for causes and solutions, the focus is not on assigning individual blame but on looking at how the entire system failed. They want to know how a pilot’s training led them to make the decision they did, or how radar equipment led an air traffic controller to lose track of a small airplane.

Meanwhile, in more traditional learning, we keep designing education, including AI-supported education, around an individual learner. But what if this is where we are getting it wrong?

How Do They Differ?

Competition vs Cooperation - What we see in collective training is that the individual learners are not working against each other, but rather are trying to work together to achieve an outcome, whether it is to secure a building or to land an airplane. 

In traditional education, though, competition plays a major role. Students are told not to copy each others’ answers, and to work as individuals on tests and assignments. Each student is graded individually; they are ranked, and sometimes graded ‘on a curve’, ensuring that they cannot all succeed.

Sameness vs Diversity - In a system or a team, people are not all the same and are not expected to know or to do the same things. Each person has a role requiring different strengths and abilities. The success of the team depends less on individual performance and more on how well the team members with different skills work together. The strongest teams are resilient: even if an individual fails, the team can succeed.

Contrast this with traditional education where everybody is expected to learn the same thing. This is the idea behind such concepts as a common core, standardized testing, and course curricula. Before the end of high school, there is little opportunity for specialization (unless you are fortunate enough to attend a specialty school such as the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School). In higher education more specialization is allowed, but within disciplines, commonality, not diversity, is stressed.

What Would It Take?

Collective learning isn’t about treating individuals as nameless and faceless clones. Rather, it shifts our emphasis from measuring what sets them apart from each other to how they contribute to the team or project as a whole.

In a very real sense, we are more concerned about what they can give to the education system than about what they can take from it. So our objective is to help and support them, rather than to limit and to grade them. We’re focused on what they bring to the table, not what skill or attribute they’re lacking. How they can help, rather than how they can improve.

Evaluating each student individually actually works against this model of learning. It positions the education system as a stern critic rather than a supportive advocate. It breaks down and separates individuals with classes, rather than teaching them to work together. So if we want to support collective learning, we need to part ways with the idea of marking and grades.

How Learning Changes

We can right away jettison the idea of what the education technology industry calls ‘personalized learning’, a model where each person works on their own in front of a computer screen with a learning system that evaluates them as they go and offers tailored lessons and assignments to help them through a prescribed curriculum.

That’s not to say that different students shouldn’t receive different support and resources. Rather, the support we offer a student is based on what they are trying to do rather than some preconceived idea of how they could be better. And this is defined by how they can contribute to what the team as a whole is trying to accomplish.

Learning changes from a model where sharing and support are considered to be cheating to one where sharing and support are expected. Tools are not allowed or disallowed on the basis of whether they support or hinder some hypothetical cognitive capacity but rather are selected based on whether they will help the student get the job done.

What We Can Do

What we’re describing here isn’t ‘Groupwork’. There isn’t some learning objective lurking in the background acting as the hidden purpose behind some collaborative process. We’re interested in genuinely creative team projects and activities that are completed for their own sake. 

Though instructors still share their knowledge and skills, they also play the much more difficult role of what we might call the community organizer. It’s not always obvious to everyone how they can work together to meet common objectives. The organizer needs to help communities find ways where everyone can contribute and where what needs to get done is, somehow, done.

Teachers and technology need to be oriented to the common purpose of helping people connect, express themselves, resolve conflicts, manage and share resources, support each other, and to identify and work toward something they all support. What matters are process and collegiality and, to a certain degree, the outcome.