about the world
Seven dimensions evaluated for the 3 different components of each C.
Aspects of the overall educational program teaching, emphasizing, and promoting the 4Cs | |
Availability and access to different means, materials, space, and expertise, digital technologies, mnemonic and heuristic methods, etc. to assist in the proper use and exercise of the 4Cs | |
Actual student and program use of available resources promoting the 4Cs | |
Critical reflection and metacognition on the process being engaged in around the 4Cs | |
The formal and informal training, skills, and abilities of teachers/trainers and staff and their program of development as promoters of the 4Cs | |
Use and integration of the full range of resources external to the institution available to enhance the 4Cs | |
Availability of resources for students to create and actualize products, programs, events, etc. that require the exercise, promotion, or manifestation of the 4Cs |
* Educational-level dependent and potentially less available for younger students or in some contexts.
The grid itself can be used in several important and different ways by different educational stakeholders: (1) by the institution itself in its self-evaluation and possible preparation for a certification or labelization process, (2) as an explicit list of criteria for external evaluation of the institution and its 4Cs-related programs, and (3) as a potential long-term development targeting tool for the institution or the institution in dialogue with the labelization process.
Dropping the component of “creative person” that is not relevant at the institutional level, this evaluation grid is based on Rhodes’ ( 1961 ) classic “4P” model of creativity, which remains the most concise model today ( Lubart and Thornhill-Miller 2019 ). The three “P” components retained are: creative process , creative environment , and creative product . Creative process refers to the acquisition of a set of tools and techniques that students can use to enhance the creativity of their thinking and work. Creative environment (also called “Press” in earlier literature) is about how the physical and social surroundings of students can help them be more creative. Finally, creative product refers to the evaluation of actual “productions” (e.g., a piece of art, text, speech, etc.) generated through the creative process.
Our evaluation grid divides critical thinking into three main components: critical thinking about the world , critical thinking about oneself (self-reflection), as well as critical action and decision making . The first component refers to having an evidence-based view of the exterior world, notably by identifying and evaluating sources of information and using them to question current understandings and solve problems. Self-reflection refers to thinking critically about one’s own life situation, values, and actions; it presupposes the autonomy of thought and a certain distance as well as the most objective observation possible with regard to one’s own knowledge (“meta-cognition”). The third and final component, critical action and decision making, is about using critical thinking skills more practically in order to make appropriate life decisions as well as to be open to different points of view. This component also addresses soft skills and attitudes such as trusting information.
Our evaluation framework for critical thinking was in part inspired by Barnett’s “curriculum for critical being” (2015), whose model distinguishes two axes: one defined by the qualitative differences in the level of criticality attained and the second comprised of three different domains of application: formal knowledge, the self, and the world. The first two components of our framework (and the seven dimensions on which they are rated) reflect and encompass these three domains. Similar to Barrett’s proposal, our third rubric moves beyond the “skills-plus-dispositions” model of competency implicit in much theorizing about critical thinking and adds the importance of “action”—not just the ability to think critically and the disposition to do so, but the central importance of training and practicing “critical doing” ( Barnett 2015 ). Critical thinking should also be exercised collectively by involving students in collective thinking, facilitating the exchange of ideas and civic engagement ( Huber and Kuncel 2016 ).
The first component of collaboration skills in the IICD grid is engagement and participation , referring to the active engagement in group work. Perspective taking and openness concerns the flexibility to work with and accommodate other group members and their points of view. The final dimension— social regulation —is about being able to reach for a common goal, notably through compromise and negotiation, as well as being aware of the different types of roles that group members can hold ( Hesse et al. 2015 ; Rusdin and Ali 2019 ; Care et al. 2016 ). (These last two components include elements of leadership, character, and emotional intelligence as sometimes described in other soft-skill and competency-related systems.) Participation, social regulation, and perspective taking have been identified as central social skills in collaborative problem solving ( Hesse et al. 2015 ). Regarding social regulation in this context, recognizing and profiting from group diversity is key ( Graesser et al. 2018 ). When describing an assessment in an educational setting of collaborative problem solving (with a task in which two or more students have to collaborate in order to solve it, each using a different set of resources), two main underpinning skills were described for the assessment: the social skill of audience awareness (“how to adapt one’s own behavior to suit the needs of the task and the partner’s requirements”, Care et al. 2016, p. 258 ) and the cognitive skill of planning and executing (developing a plan to reach for a goal) ( Care et al. 2016 ). The former is included in the perspective taking and openness rubric and the latter in the social regulation component in the IICD grid. Evans ( 2020 ) identified four main collaboration skills consistently mentioned in the scientific literature that are assessed in the IICD grid: the ability to plan and make group decisions (example item from the IICD grid: teachers provide assistance to students to overcome differences and reach a common goal during group work); the ability to communicate about thinking with the group (assessed notably in the meta-reflection strand of the IICD grid); the ability to contribute resources, ideas, and efforts and support group members (included notably in the engagement and participation as well as the social regulation components); and finally, the ability to monitor, reflect, and adapt individual and group processes to benefit the group (example item from the IICD grid: students use perspective-taking tools and techniques in group activities).
The evaluation grid for communication is also composed of three dimensions: message formulation, message delivery, and message and communication feedback . Message formulation refers to the ability to design and structure a message to be sent, such as outlining the content of an argument. Message delivery is about effectively transmitting verbal and non-verbal aspects of a message. Finally, message and communication feedback refers to the ability of students and teachers to understand their audience, analyze their social surroundings, and interpret information in context. Other components of communication skills such as theory of mind, empathy, or emotional intelligence are also relevant and included in the process of applying the grid. Thompson ( 2020 ) proposes a four-component operationalized definition of communication for its assessment in students. First, they describe a comprehension strand covering the understanding and selection of adequate information from a range of sources. Message formulation in the IICD grid captures this dimension through its focus on content analysis and generation. Second, the presentation of information and ideas is mentioned in several different modes, adjusted to the intended audience, verbally as well as non-verbally. The message delivery component of the IICD grid focuses on these points. Third, the authors note the importance of communication technology and its advanced use. The IICD grid also covers the importance of technology use in its tools and techniques category, with, for example, an item that reads: students learn to effectively use a variety of formats of communication (social media, make a video, e-mail, letter writing, creating a document). Finally, Thompson ( 2020 ) describes the recognition of cultural and other differences as an important aspect of communication. The IICD grid aims at incorporating these aspects, notably in the meta-reflection category under each of the three dimensions.
5.1. the 4cs in informal educational contexts.
So far, the focus has been on rather formal ways of nurturing the 4Cs. Although institutions and training programs are perhaps the most significant and necessary avenues of education, they are not the sole context in which 4Cs’ learning and improvement can manifest. One other important potential learning context is game play. Games are activities that are present and participated in throughout human society—by those of all ages, genders, and socio-economic statuses ( Bateson and Martin 2013 ; Huizinga 1949 ; Malaby 2007 ). This informal setting can also provide favorable conditions to help improve the 4Cs ( van Rosmalen et al. 2014 ) and should not be under-appreciated. Games provide a unique environment for learning, as they can foster a space to freely explore possibilities and one’s own potential ( de Freitas 2006 ). We argue that games are a significant potential pathway for the improvement of the 4Cs, and as such, they merit the same attention as more formal ways of learning and developing competencies.
Compared to schools and educational institutions, the focus of IICD’s evaluation framework for games (see International Institute for Competency Development 2021 ) is more narrow. Thus, it is fundamentally different from the institutional grid: games, complex and deep as they can sometimes be, cannot directly be compared to the complexity of a school curriculum and all the programs it contains. The evaluation of a game’s effectiveness for training/improving a given C rests on the following principle: if a game presents affordances conducive to exercising a given skill, engaged playing of that game should help improve that skill.
The game’s evaluation grid is scored based on two criteria. For example, as a part of a game’s rating as a tool for the development of creativity, we determine the game must first meet two conditions. First, whether or not the game allows the opportunity for creativity to manifest itself: if creativity cannot occur in the game, it is obviously not eligible to receive ratings for that C. Second, whether or not creativity is needed in order to perform well in the game: if the players can win or achieve success in the game without needing creativity, this also means it cannot receive a rating for that C. If both conditions are met, however, the game will be considered potentially effective to improve creativity through the practice of certain components of creative behavior. This basic principle applies for all four of the Cs.
As outlined in Table 3 , below, the evaluation grid for each of the four Cs is composed of five components relevant to games that are different for each of the Cs. The grid works as follows: for each of the five components of each C, we evaluate the game on a list of sub-components using two yes/no scales: one for whether it is “possible” for that subcomponent to manifest and one for whether that sub-component is “required for success” in the game. This evaluation is done for all sub-components. After this, each general component is rated on the same two indicators. If 60% (i.e., three out of five) or more sub-components are positively rated as required, the general component is considered required. Then, the game is evaluated on its effectiveness for training and improving each of the 4Cs. If 60% or more components are positively rated as required, the game will be labelized as having the potential to be effective for training and improving the corresponding C.
Five different components evaluated for each C by the 4Cs assessment framework for games.
Originality | Divergent Thinking | Convergent Thinking | Mental Flexibility | Creative Dispositions | |
Goal-adequate judgment/ discernment | Objective thinking | Metacognition | Elaborate eeasoning | Uncertainty management | |
Collaboration fluency | Well-argued deliberation and consensus-based decision | Balance of contribution | Organization and coordination | Cognitive syncing, input, and support | |
Social Interactions | Social cognition | Mastery of written and spoken language | Verbal communication | Non-verbal communication |
The evaluation grid for creativity is based on the multivariate model of creative potential (see Section 2.1.1 and Lubart et al. 2013 for more information) and is composed of four cognitive factors and one conative factor: originality , divergent thinking , convergent thinking , mental flexibility , and creative dispositions . Originality refers to the generation of ideas that are novel or unexpected, depending on the context. Divergent thinking corresponds to the generation of multiple ideas or solutions. Convergent thinking refers to the combination of multiple ideas and the selection of the most creative idea. Mental flexibility entails changing perspectives on a given problem and breaking away from initial ideas. Finally, creative dispositions concerns multiple personality-related factors conducive to creativity, such as openness to experience or risk taking.
The evaluation grid for critical thinking echoes Halpern’s ( 1998 ) as well as Marin and Halpern’s ( 2011 ) considerations for teaching this skill, that is, taking into consideration thinking skills, metacognition, and dispositions. The five components of the critical thinking grid are: goal-adequate discernment, objective thinking, metacognition, elaborate reasoning, and uncertainty management. Goal-adequate discernment entails the formulation of inferences and the discernment of contradictions when faced with a problem. Objective thinking corresponds to the suspension of one’s own judgment and the analysis of affirmations and sources in the most objective manner possible. Metacognition, here, is about questioning and reassessing information, as well as the awareness of one’s own cognitive biases. Elaborate reasoning entails reasoning in a way that is cautious, thorough, and serious. Finally, uncertainty management refers to the dispositional propensity to tolerate ambiguity and accept doubt.
The evaluation grid for collaboration is based on the quality of collaboration (QC) method ( Burkhardt et al. 2009 ; see Section 2.4.2 for more details) and is composed of the following five components: collaboration fluidity, well-argued deliberation and consensus-based decision, balance of contribution, organization and coordination, and cognitive syncing, input, and support. Collaboration fluidity entails the absence of speech overlap and the presence of a good flow in terms of turns to speak. Well-argued deliberation and consensus-based decision is about contributing to the discussion and task at hand, as well as participating in discussions and arguments, in order to obtain a consensus. Balance of contribution refers to having equal or equivalent contributions to organization, coordination, and decision making. Organization and coordination refers to effective management of roles, time, and “deadlines”, as well as the attribution of roles depending on participants’ skills. Finally, cognitive syncing, input, and support is about bringing ideas and resources to the group, as well as supporting and reinforcing other members of the group.
The five components used to evaluate communication in games include both linguistic, pragmatic, and social aspects. Linguistic skills per se are captured by the mastery of written and spoken language component. This component assesses language comprehension and the appropriate use of vocabulary. Pragmatic skills are captured by the verbal and non-verbal communication components and refer to the efficient use of verbal and body signals in the context of the game to achieve one’s communicative goals ( Grassmann 2014 ; Matthews 2014 ). Finally, the grid also evaluates social skills with its two last components, social interactions and social cognition, which, respectively, refer to the ability to interact with others appropriately—including by complying with the rules of the game—and to the understanding of other people’ mental states ( Tomasello 2005 ).
Each of the 4Cs is a broad, multi-faceted concept that is the subject of a tremendous amount of research and discussion by a wide range of stakeholders in different disciplines, professions, and parts of the educational establishment. The development of evaluation frameworks to allow support for the 4Cs to be assessed and publicly recognized, using a label, is an important step for promoting and fostering these skills in educational contexts. As illustrated by IICD’s 4Cs Framework for educational institutions and programs, as well as its games/activities evaluation grid, the specific criteria to detect support for each C can vary depending upon the educational context (e.g., formal and institutional level or informal and at the activity level). Yet considering the 4Cs together highlights some additional observations, current challenges, and opportunities for the future that are worthy of discussion.
One very important issue for understanding the 4Cs and their educational implementation that can be simultaneously a help and a hindrance for teaching them—and also a challenge when assessing them—is their multidimensionality and interrelatedness. In other words, the 4Cs are not entirely separate entities but instead, as Figure 2 shows, should be seen as four interlinked basic “elements” for future-oriented education that can help individuals in their learning process and, together, synergistically “bootstrap” the development of their cognitive potentials. Lamri and Lubart ( 2021 ), for example, found a certain base level of creativity was a necessary but not sufficient condition for success in managerial tasks, but that high-level performance required a combination of all four Cs. Some thinkers have argued that one cannot be creative without critical thinking, which also requires creativity, for example, to come up with alternative arguments (see Paul and Elder 2006 ). Similarly, among many other interrelationships, there is no collaboration without communication—and even ostensibly individual creativity is a “collaboration” of sorts with the general culture and precursors in a given field. As a result, it ranges from impossible to suboptimal to teach (or teach towards) one of the 4Cs without involving one or more of the others, and this commingling also underscores the genuine need and appropriateness of assessing them together.
“‘Crea-Critical-Collab-ication’: a Dynamic Interactionist Model of the 4Cs”. (Illustration of the interplay and interpenetration of creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication shown in dimensional space according to their differing cognitive/individual vs. social/interpersonal emphases; (© 2023, Branden Thornhill-Miller. All Rights Reserved. thornhill-miller.com; accessed on 20 January 2023)).
From this perspective, Thornhill-Miller ( 2021 ) proposed a “dynamic interactionist model of the 4Cs” and their interrelated contributions to the future of education and work. Presented in Figure 2 , this model is meant to serve as a visual and conceptual aid for understanding the 4Cs and their interrelationships, thereby also promoting better use and understanding of them in pedagogical and policy settings. In addition to suggesting the portmanteau of “crea-critical thinking” as a new term to describe the overlap of much of the creative and critical thinking processes, the title of this model, “Crea-Critical-Collab-ication”, is a verbal representation of the fluid four-way interrelationship between the 4Cs visually represented in Figure 2 (a title meant to playfully repackage the 4Cs for important pedagogical and policy uses). This model goes further to suggest some dimensional differences in emphases that, roughly speaking, also often exist among the 4Cs: that is to say, the frequently greater emphasis on cognitive or individual elements at play in creativity and critical thinking in comparison to the social and interpersonal aspects more central to communication and collaboration ( Thornhill-Miller 2021 ).
Similarly focused on the need to promote a phase change towards future-oriented education, Lucas ( 2019 ) and colleagues have suggested conflating creative thinking and critical thinking in order to propose “3Cs” (creative thinking, communication, and collaboration) as new “foundational literacies” to symmetrically add to the 3Rs (Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic) of previous educational eras. Although we applaud these efforts, from our applied research perspective, we believe that the individual importance of, and distinct differences between, creative thinking and critical thinking support preserving them both as separate constructs in order to encourage the greatest development of each of them. Moreover, if only three categories were somehow required or preferable, one could argue that uniting communication and collaboration (as “collab-ication” suggests) might be preferable—particularly also given the fact that substantial aspects of communication are already covered within the 3Rs. In any case, we look forward to more such innovations and collaborations in this vibrant and important area of work at the crossroads between research, pedagogy, and policy development.
The rich literature in each of the 4Cs domains shows the positive effects of integrating these dimensions into educational and professional curricula. At the same time, the complexity of their definitions makes them difficult to assess, both in terms of reliability (assessment must not vary from one measurement to another) and of validity (tests must measure that which they are intended to measure). However, applied research in this area is becoming increasingly rigorous, with a growing capacity to provide the necessary tools for evidence-based practice. The development of these practices should involve interdisciplinary teams of teachers and other educational practitioners who are equipped and trained accordingly. Similarly, on the research side, further exploration and clarification of subcomponents of the 4Cs and other related skills will be important. Recent efforts to clarify the conceptual overlap and hierarchical relations of soft skills for the future of education and work, for example, have been helpful and promising (e.g., Joie-La Marle et al. 2022 ; Lamri et al. 2022 ). But the most definitive sort of taxonomy and measurement model that we are currently lacking might only be established based on the large-scale administration of a comprehensive battery of skill-measuring psychometric tests on appropriate cross sections of society.
The rapid development and integration of new technologies will also aid and change the contexts, resources, and implementation of the 4Cs. For example, the recent developments make it clear that the 4Cs will be enhanced and changed by interaction with artificially intelligence, even as 4Cs-related skills will probably, for the same reason, increasingly constitute the core of available human work in the future (see, e.g., Ross 2018 ). Similarly, research on virtual reality and creativity suggest that VR environments assist and expand individual and collaborative creativity ( Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2022 ). Because VR technologies offer the possibility of enhanced and materially enriched communication, collaboration, and information availability, they not only allow for the enhancement of creativity techniques but also for similar expansions and improvements on almost all forms of human activity (see Thornhill-Miller and Dupont 2016 )—including the other three Cs.
Traditional educational approaches cannot meet the educational needs of our emergent societies if they do not teach, promote, and assess in line with the new learner characteristics and contexts of the 21st century ( Sahin 2009 ). The sort of future-oriented change and development required by this shift in institutional practices, programming, and structure will likely meet with significant resistance from comfortably entrenched (and often outdated) segments of traditional educational and training establishments. Additional external evaluation and monitoring is rarely welcome by workers in any context. We believe, however, that top-down processes from the innovative and competition-conscious administrative levels will be met by bottom-up demands from students and education consumers to support these institutional changes. And we contend that efforts such as labelizing 4C processes will serve to push educators and institutions towards more relevant offerings, oriented towards the future of work and helping build a more successful future for all.
In the end, the 4Cs framework seems to be a manageable, focused model for modernizing education, and one worthy of its growing prevalence in the educational and research marketplace for a number of reasons. These reasons include the complexity and cumbersome nature of larger alternative systems and the 4Cs’ persuasive presence at the core of a number of early and industry-driven frameworks. In addition, the 4Cs have benefitted from their subsequent promotion by organizations such as the OECD and the World Economic Forum, as well as some more direct support from recent empirical research. The promotion, teaching, and assessment of the 4Cs will require a complex social intervention and mobilization of educational resources—a major shift in pedagogy and institutional structures. Yet the same evolving digital technologies that have largely caused the need for these massive, rapid changes can also assist in the implementation of solutions ( van Laar et al. 2017 ). To the extent that future research also converges on such a model (that has already been found pedagogically useful and policy-friendly by so many individuals and organizations), the 4Cs framework has the potential to become a manageable core for 21st century skills and the future of education and work—one that stakeholders with various agendas can already begin building on for a better educational and economic future together.
This research received no external funding.
Conceptualization, B.T.-M. and T.L.; writing—original draft preparation, B.T.-M., A.C., M.M., J.-M.B., T.M., S.B.-B., S.E.H., F.V., M.A.-L., C.F., D.S., F.M.; writing—review and editing, B.T.-M., A.C., T.L., J.-M.B., C.F.; visualization, B.T.-M.; supervision, B.T.-M., T.L.; project administration, B.T.-M., T.L. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Not applicable.
Data availability statement, conflicts of interest.
B.T.-M. and T.L. are unpaid academic co-founder and project collaborator for the International Institute for Competency Development, whose labelization frameworks (developed in cooperation with Afnor International and the LaPEA lab of Université Paris Cité and Université Gustave Eiffel) are used as examples in this review. S.E.H. and M.A.-L. are employees of AFNOR International. No funding was received to support this research or article, which reflects the views of the scientists and researchers and not their organizations or companies.
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How to adopt a collaborative problem-solving approach through 'yes, and' thinking.
After more than 24 years of coaching, I've noticed that teams and organizations still use traditional problem-solving techniques despite these being either obsolete or ineffective. For example, individuals still attempt to focus and dissect problems on their own with the hope of coming up with a solution by themselves.
I also notice a pattern of clients operating in silos. They have a tendency to equate the ability to solve problems by themselves as a form of independence and initiative. This works only to a certain degree. As the problem becomes more complex, this solo-solving technique becomes ineffective. Instead, teams should tap into the increasingly diverse and multidisciplinary pool that makes up the workforce. Not only is this useful for performance and productivity but also for problem solving.
I have found the collaborative problem-solving approach, by Alexander Hancock , to be an effective approach to achieving clients’ objectives. Collaborative problem solving occurs as you collaborate with other people to exchange information, ideas or perspectives. The essence of this type of collaboration is based on “yes, and” thinking – building on and valuing each other’s ideas.
Any individual, team or company can take advantage of this approach. I have found this approach to be most effective for companies facing problems that involve team members from different departments, backgrounds and personalities. This is also an approach that is usually unique to the coaching profession.
In any situation, when someone comes to you as a leader with a problem to discuss, your role is to help him or her look for the causes and discover solutions. Your role is not to resolve the problem alone but to guide them through collaborative problem-solving approach.
Attitudes For Collaborative Problem Solving
Hancock provides the list below of attitudes that are best paired with the approach:
• Win-win abundance thinking: Collaboration allows you to work with others to develop solutions that will benefit you both. The key concept is to believe that it is possible to create a synergistic solution before you create them. It is not "you vs. me" — we can both succeed. Develop an "abundance mentality" — there is enough for everyone. “If you win, we all win.”
• Patience: Collaboration takes time. You need to recognize that you are both helping one another to reach a resolution, and it may take more than one meeting to discuss. You will often need to work together over time to reach a satisfying solution that you will both agree on.
• “Yes, and” thinking: Move away from polarized (either/or) thinking, and develop a “yes, and” way of thinking. This thinking is supporting a suggested idea and building on the idea to make it better.
Benefits Of Collaborative Problem Solving
Collaborative problem solving opens communication and builds trust in the relationship as you and your co-collaborator discover that you are both working together toward a shared outcome. This increases a joint commitment to the relationship and to the organization. It also indicates a commitment to helping others reach their goals and objectives, and to improve everyone’s performance for the company or the organization. Collaborative communication also encourages finding creative solutions. This increases the likelihood that others will take ownership of an issue and its solution.
Collaborative Problem-Solving Techniques
There are techniques that can help you engage in collaborative communication. Here are a few examples:
• Build on and connect ideas, rather than discarding one idea and looking for another one.
• Explore the strengths and drawbacks of each idea, compare and balance the pluses and drawbacks of each idea.
• Convert drawbacks to new possibilities. Try to find ways to integrate and combine new possibilities into an existing idea.
• When sharing your own opinion, make sure you offer it as a suggestion and not as a directive. The intention of collaborative problem solving is to provide a catalyst for exploration and consideration, instead of having the other person accept your advice or direction.
The collaborative problem-solving approach paves ways to open communication, trust, better planning and smooth implementation of a plan or strategy.
April 30, 2023 They say two heads are better than one, but is that true when it comes to solving problems in the workplace? To solve any problem—whether personal (eg, deciding where to live), business-related (eg, raising product prices), or societal (eg, reversing the obesity epidemic)—it’s crucial to first define the problem. In a team setting, that translates to establishing a collective understanding of the problem, awareness of context, and alignment of stakeholders. “Both good strategy and good problem solving involve getting clarity about the problem at hand, being able to disaggregate it in some way, and setting priorities,” Rob McLean, McKinsey director emeritus, told McKinsey senior partner Chris Bradley in an Inside the Strategy Room podcast episode . Check out these insights to uncover how your team can come up with the best solutions for the most complex challenges by adopting a methodical and collaborative approach.
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What is collaborative problem solving, how to solve problems as a team, celebrating success as a team.
Problems arise. That's a well-known fact of life and business. When they do, it may seem more straightforward to take individual ownership of the problem and immediately run with trying to solve it. However, the most effective problem-solving solutions often come through collaborative problem solving.
As defined by Webster's Dictionary , the word collaborate is to work jointly with others or together, especially in an intellectual endeavor. Therefore, collaborative problem solving (CPS) is essentially solving problems by working together as a team. While problems can and are solved individually, CPS often brings about the best resolution to a problem while also developing a team atmosphere and encouraging creative thinking.
Because collaborative problem solving involves multiple people and ideas, there are some techniques that can help you stay on track, engage efficiently, and communicate effectively during collaboration.
The burden that is lifted when a problem is solved is enough victory for some. However, a team that plays together should celebrate together. It's not only collaboration that brings unity to a team. It's also the combined celebration of a unified victory—the moment you look around and realize the collectiveness of your success.
Check out MindManager to learn more about how you can ignite teamwork and innovation by providing a clearer perspective on the big picture with a suite of sharing options and collaborative tools.
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Professor of Cognitive Sciences, University of Central Florida
Stephen M. Fiore has received funding from federal agencies such as NASA, ONR, DARPA, and the NSF to study collaborative problem solving and teamwork. He is past president of the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research, currently a board member of the International Network for the Science of Team Science, and a member of DARPA's Information Science and Technology working group.
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Challenges are a fact of life. Whether it’s a high-tech company figuring out how to shrink its carbon footprint, or a local community trying to identify new revenue sources, people are continually dealing with problems that require input from others. In the modern world, we face problems that are broad in scope and great in scale of impact – think of trying to understand and identify potential solutions related to climate change, cybersecurity or authoritarian leaders.
But people usually aren’t born competent in collaborative problem-solving. In fact, a famous turn of phrase about teams is that a team of experts does not make an expert team . Just as troubling, the evidence suggests that, for the most part, people aren’t being taught this skill either. A 2012 survey by the American Management Association found that higher level managers believed recent college graduates lack collaboration abilities .
Maybe even worse, college grads seem to overestimate their own competence. One 2015 survey found nearly two-thirds of recent graduates believed they can effectively work in a team, but only one-third of managers agreed . The tragic irony is that the less competent you are, the less accurate is your self-assessment of your own competence. It seems that this infamous Dunning-Kruger effect can also occur for teamwork.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that in a 2015 international assessment of hundreds of thousands of students, less than 10% performed at the highest level of collaboration . For example, the vast majority of students could not overcome teamwork obstacles or resolve conflict. They were not able to monitor group dynamics or to engage in the kind of actions needed to make sure the team interacted according to their roles. Given that all these students have had group learning opportunities in and out of school over many years, this points to a global deficit in the acquisition of collaboration skills.
How can this deficiency be addressed? What makes one team effective while another fails? How can educators improve training and testing of collaborative problem-solving? Drawing from disciplines that study cognition, collaboration and learning, my colleagues and I have been studying teamwork processes. Based on this research, we have three key recommendations.
At the most general level, collaborative problem-solving requires team members to establish and maintain a shared understanding of the situation they’re facing and any relevant problem elements they’ve identified. At the start, there’s typically an uneven distribution of knowledge on a team. Members must maintain communication to help each other know who knows what, as well as help each other interpret elements of the problem and which expertise should be applied.
Then the team can get to work, laying out subtasks based upon member roles, or creating mechanisms to coordinate member actions. They’ll critique possible solutions to identify the most appropriate path forward.
Finally, at a higher level, collaborative problem-solving requires keeping the team organized – for example, by monitoring interactions and providing feedback to each other. Team members need, at least, basic interpersonal competencies that help them manage relationships within the team (like encouraging participation) and communication (like listening to learn). Even better is the more sophisticated ability to take others’ perspectives, in order to consider alternative views of problem elements.
Whether it is a team of professionals in an organization or a team of scientists solving complex scientific problems , communicating clearly, managing conflict, understanding roles on a team, and knowing who knows what – all are collaboration skills related to effective teamwork.
When so many students are continually engaged in group projects, or collaborative learning, why are they not learning about teamwork? There are interrelated factors that may be creating graduates who collaborate poorly but who think they are quite good at teamwork.
I suggest students vastly overestimate their collaboration skills due to the dangerous combination of a lack of systematic instruction coupled with inadequate feedback. On the one hand, students engage in a great deal of group work in high school and college. On the other hand, students rarely receive meaningful instruction, modeling and feedback on collaboration . Decades of research on learning show that explicit instruction and feedback are crucial for mastery .
Although classes that implement collaborative problem-solving do provide some instruction and feedback, it’s not necessarily about their teamwork. Students are learning about concepts in classes; they are acquiring knowledge about a domain. What is missing is something that forces them to explicitly reflect on their ability to work with others.
When students process feedback on how well they learned something, or whether they solved a problem, they mistakenly think this is also indicative of effective teamwork. I hypothesize that students come to conflate learning course content material in any group context with collaboration competency.
Now that we’ve defined the problem, what can be done? A century of research on team training , combined with decades of research on group learning in the classroom , points the way forward. My colleagues and I have distilled some core elements from this literature to suggest improvements for collaborative learning .
First, most pressing is to get training on teamwork into the world’s classrooms. At a minimum, this needs to happen during college undergraduate education, but even better would be starting in high school or earlier. Research has demonstrated it’s possible to teach collaboration competencies such as dealing with conflict and communicating to learn. Researchers and educators need, themselves, to collaborate to adapt these methods for the classroom.
Secondly, students need opportunities for practice. Although most already have experience working in groups, this needs to move beyond science and engineering classes. Students need to learn to work across disciplines so after graduation they can work across professions on solving complex societal problems.
Third, any systematic instruction and practice setting needs to include feedback. This is not simply feedback on whether they solved the problem or did well on learning course content. Rather, it needs to be feedback on interpersonal competencies that drive successful collaboration. Instructors should assess students on teamwork processes like relationship management, where they encourage participation from each other, as well as skills in communication where they actively listen to their teammates.
Even better would be feedback telling students how well they were able to take on the perspective of a teammate from another discipline. For example, was the engineering student able to take the view of a student in law and understand the legal ramifications of a new technology’s implementation?
My colleagues and I believe that explicit instruction on how to collaborate, opportunities for practice, and feedback about collaboration processes will better prepare today’s students to work together to solve tomorrow’s problems.
Idaho Youth Ranch May 4, 2023 10:12:47 PM
Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) is an evidence-based approach that focuses on understanding and addressing the root causes of challenging behavior in children and adolescents. Developed by Dr. Ross Greene, CPS aims to foster empathy, communication, and collaboration between parents, children, and professionals, ultimately leading to more effective and lasting solutions for family issues. This resource guide provides an overview of the CPS model, outlines the key principles and steps involved, and offers practical tips and strategies for counselors working with families.
The Collaborative Problem Solving Model
1. Understanding the CPS Philosophy
CPS is grounded in the belief that children do well if they can. The approach posits that challenging behavior is not due to a lack of motivation, attention-seeking, or manipulation but rather a result of lagging skills and unsolved problems. By understanding and addressing these underlying factors, counselors can help families develop more effective, compassionate, and sustainable solutions.
2. Key Principles of CPS
Empathy: The foundation of the CPS model is empathic understanding, which involves recognizing and validating the feelings and perspectives of all family members.
Collaboration: CPS emphasizes the importance of working together rather than relying on unilateral decision-making or power-based approaches.
Skill-building: The approach focuses on identifying and addressing lagging skills, such as emotion regulation, problem-solving, and communication, to promote lasting change.
Implementing the Collaborative Problem Solving Process
The first step in the CPS process is to identify the specific skills that a child may be struggling with. This can be done through a combination of observation, interviews, and assessments. Some common lagging skills include:
Emotional regulation
Flexibility
Impulse control
Problem-solving
Communication
Once lagging skills have been identified, the next step is to determine the specific situations or problems that are causing difficulties for the child and family. Unsolved problems are often characterized by predictability and can be uncovered through discussions with family members and the child.
3. The Three Steps of Collaborative Problem Solving
The CPS process involves three primary steps, which can be adapted and tailored to the unique needs and circumstances of each family.
Begin by gathering information and understanding the child’s perspective on the problem. This step involves active listening, validating emotions, and demonstrating genuine curiosity.
Clearly articulate the parent or caregiver’s concerns and needs regarding the situation. This step promotes mutual understanding and acknowledges the importance of addressing both the child’s and the adult’s concerns.
Invite the child and parent to brainstorm possible solutions together. Encourage them to consider a range of ideas and evaluate each option based on its feasibility and effectiveness in addressing both the child’s and the adult’s concerns.
Tips and Strategies for Counselors
1. Build Rapport and Establish Trust
Establishing a strong therapeutic alliance with both the child and the parent is essential for the success of CPS. Be patient, empathetic, and transparent in your approach in order to foster trust and cooperation.
2. Use Reflective Listening and Validation
Active listening and validation are crucial tools in the CPS process. Reflect back the emotions and concerns of family members to ensure they feel heard and understood.
3. Encourage Open Communication
Create a safe and non-judgmental environment that encourages open communication and allows family members to express their thoughts, feelings, and concerns without fear of criticism or rejection.
4. Be Flexible and Adaptable
Each family is unique, and the CPS process may need to be adapted to suit their specific needs and circumstances. Be prepared to modify your approach, pacing, and techniques as needed to best support the family.
5. Provide Support and Guidance
As a counselor, your role is to facilitate the CPS process and provide guidance and support to the family throughout. Offer suggestions, ask probing questions, and share relevant resources to help family members develop their problem-solving skills.
6. Monitor Progress and Adjust
Regularly assess the family’s progress and the effectiveness of the solutions they’ve implemented. Be prepared to revisit and adjust the problem-solving process as needed, based on the family’s evolving needs and circumstances.
7. Encourage Skill-Building
As part of the CPS process, help family members develop and practice the skills necessary to address their unsolved problems effectively. This may include offering resources, psychoeducation, or skill-building exercises to support growth in areas such as emotion regulation, communication, and flexibility.
Collaborative Problem Solving offers a compassionate and effective approach to addressing challenging behaviors and family issues. By understanding the underlying causes of these difficulties and engaging in a collaborative, empathic problem-solving process, counselors can help families develop lasting solutions and strengthen their relationships. By following the principles and steps outlined in this resource guide and adapting your approach to meet the unique needs of each family, you can support families in achieving positive, sustainable change.
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In order to do anything well, team members need to work together.
Teamwork and collaboration are must-haves for any work environment. Yet still, many teams and employees struggle to collaborate effectively.
After all, there are plenty of factors that go into collaboration. Communication and strategy impact collaboration. Conflict resolution and the ability to solve problems matter in collaboration . Even the types of collaboration tools can have an impact on how well your teams work together.
Team collaboration requires certain skills and capabilities, whether your teams are remote or in-person. According to a Gensler survey, a majority of employees say their jobs rely on collaboration .
Businesses everywhere are struggling with how to optimize their workforce. With some organizations downsizing in response to economic uncertainty , teamwork is more important than ever. Organizations are also working to maintain and sustain positive company cultures while keeping collaboration a key attribute of their teams.
In this post, we’ll talk about how your teams can collaborate effectively. We’ll also talk about the role of leadership in creating a collaborative culture. After all, collaboration can be the factor that drives your organizational performance .
In order to create a collaborative environment, your leaders need to invest in building trust. So much of building trust stems from leadership.
First, employees need to feel psychologically safe in their work environment. They need to feel like they can show up as their whole selves to work. After all, personal and work lives have melded together more than ever before. Especially in hybrid and remote work environments , successful collaboration hinges on the example that your leadership team sets.
Second, employees need to be able to communicate effectively . It’s impossible to work well with co-workers without effective communication.
But communication is more than just sending emails, Slacks, or participating in face-to-face meetings . It’s the ability to communicate when a project hits roadblocks.
It’s the ability to resolve conflicts and overcome disagreements in healthy ways. It’s the ability to communicate the decision-making process. It’s the ability to connect the larger purpose of work to the day-to-day tasks. At the end of the day, communication is what helps employees understand common goals.
" People are getting new skills and then bringing them to their teams, exponentially helping others. You can feel the energy and you see how people are reaching across the aisle and busting silos to help each other." Larry McAllister, VP, Talent & Development, NetApp
Third, employees need the right collaboration tools. For example, my team uses Slack and Asana to manage workflows, update each other on projects, and share valuable information.
Project management tools like Asana are what help to keep our deliverables on track. It’s helped to make us an effective team to help meet and exceed our clear goals.
Of course, communication tools are just part of the foundation that’ll help your team collaborate well. But it’s important your teams invest in building key skill sets to help maximize the potential of your organization’s communication tools.
Collaboration skills can come to life with the right tools. But your team needs those skills and capabilities as the foundation. Then, the tools help to become that vehicle or vessel for delivery.
There are plenty of organizational benefits to effective collaboration. Your entire team and business can benefit from effective collaboration. Here are four reasons why building effective collaboration skills are important.
If you’re looking for ways to maximize collaboration in the workplace, here are eight steps to help you get started.
Your leaders need to invest in laying a foundation for psychological safety. Managers have an incredible influence over the employee experience . As our diverse workforce expands to all corners of the globe, it’s important to measure your organization’s psychological safety.
For example, BetterUp Labs recently studied the impact of belonging and psychological safety on the LGBTQIA+ community. The results? LGBTQIA+ folks still don’t feel comfortable showing up as their whole selves to work. In fact, 73% of the LGBTQIA+ participants reported showing their authentic selves to people in their personal lives. But only 35% said the same about their work lives.
But what do belonging and safety have to do with collaboration? A lot more than you may think. If employees don’t feel safe to be themselves, it’s likely they aren’t engaged at work. It can impact everything from voicing a new, bold idea in a meeting to suggesting ways to improve an old process.
Your organization can use employee engagement surveys to help measure your psychological safety. At the core of it, your leadership team should be leading by example. Manager training on how to build inclusive leadership skills is imperative to building trust within teams.
Leaders who know how to delegate are an important step to effective collaboration. No one likes a micromanager. A micromanaging boss not only increases their own workload. But they also undermine trust, stifle leadership skills, and increase anxiety in the workplace.
Good leaders need to delegate effectively to help teams spread the work across themselves. Team collaboration simply wouldn’t work without effective delegation.
You’ve probably heard of plenty of decision-making acronyms in the workplace. There’s a reason why so many exist — decisions are hard to get right.
Especially as organizations and teams grow, decisions can get more complicated. Ultimately, it can lead to missed opportunities and stunted productivity.
At BetterUp, we use the ACID framework: approver, contributor, informed, and driver. At the start of any cross-functional or collaborative project, we outline the ACID. Doing so helps every teammate understand their roles and what’s expected of them. It helps to manage clear expectations, set clear goals , and effectively collaborate.
Especially with remote teams, communication can slip through the cracks. I’ve worked for companies where I was afraid to admit or share a mistake that I made. Instead, I held onto that mistake, knowing all too well that my hiccup could impact the final outcome of a project. Why? Open, transparent communication — and psychological safety — wasn’t encouraged.
At BetterUp, my manager often encourages open communication. I’m not afraid to make a mistake anymore because I’m not afraid to ask for help or to own that mistake. I know that I can learn from my failures instead of hiding them.
In order to effectively communicate, your employees need to feel empowered to communicate openly and transparently. This can be the good things, like hitting key milestones or goals. But it should, more importantly, be the challenging things. Like when something doesn’t go as planned or the strategy or problem has evolved.
Like many skills, collaboration isn’t a skill that people are born with. It takes awareness, intention, and work.
But in order to learn and grow, employees need opportunities to do so. They need professional development avenues to help build the skills and capabilities they need to succeed. How are you offering employee development opportunities? In what ways can you make sure your employees know you support their learning pathways?
Conflict in the workplace is inevitable. We’re all human with perspectives, opinions, and experiences that are bound to clash. Especially if there are misaligned priorities, teams will come across conflict — especially when trying to collaborate.
In order to collaborate effectively, teams need to understand how to resolve conflict in healthy ways. Again, this goes back to building trust.
For example, leaders can host team building or virtual team building events to help employees get to know each other. Or your leaders can offer workshops or courses focused on how to handle conflict in the office.
Collaboration may not be an intuitive aspect of a goal. But at BetterUp, it’s something that we think about often.
As a company, we operate on OKRs: objectives and key results. They’re company-wide goals that help keep us focused on what’s most important and what will have the most impact. And there’s not a single OKR that doesn’t require cross-collaboration.
When you’re setting your business goals, take a minute to notice the threads. What goals can help empower collaboration across teams? What goals will have the most impact? How are you adjusting or setting goals to encourage collaboration to maximize your employees’ potential?
Collaboration isn’t a one-and-done skill. If we boil it down to its joints, it’s a relationship. Collaboration is constantly going to evolve because people and relationships evolve. And one of the most important things in any sort of relationship is feedback.
How are you gathering feedback on how you’re collaborating? How are you encouraging your team members to do the same? Do you follow up with your employees to ask how things are going with collaborative projects?
When I work with a new team or establish a process with a teammate, I tend to always ask for feedback. It’s a good practice to get into the habit of. It helps to establish trust, safety, and opens the door for open communication. But it also helps to keep bettering things — processes, relationships, and projects.
Collaborating well is about connecting with others, gathering feedback, and bettering the relationship. The outcomes can result in increased productivity, performance, and trust. But at its core, effective collaboration is about bettering people and relationships.
No matter where your business is in its collaboration journey, BetterUp can help. Access to coaching can help your employees build key competencies to be able to work together well.
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Madeline is a writer, communicator, and storyteller who is passionate about using words to help drive positive change. She holds a bachelor's in English Creative Writing and Communication Studies and lives in Denver, Colorado. In her spare time, she's usually somewhere outside (preferably in the mountains) — and enjoys poetry and fiction.
6 winning strategies to improve team dynamics, team collaboration 101: learning the art of working together, 7 critical teamwork skills and how to develop them, self-disclosure at work: strengthening team bonds and communication, 10 best collaboration tools to level up remote teamwork, 13 benefits of collaboration your organization needs to know, 5 tips for breaking down silos and fostering collaboration at work, what will make or break your next role find out why teamwork matters, the importance of teamwork in the workplace with tips to improve, build the dream team you need. 9 steps show you how, collaboration at work: the secret to getting better results, showing respect at workplace: for managers, peers, and ourselves, what makes a good team, and how can you build one, 12 benefits of teamwork that showcase the power of collaboration, stay connected with betterup, get our newsletter, event invites, plus product insights and research..
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The key to solving shared problems relies, in large measure, in the communication skills of the people associated with those problems. Although designed specifically for use in educational settings, Collaborative Problem Solving outlines the communication skills needed to solve problems within any group. These skills include listening actively, reflecting another person’s statements back to that person, asking questions, and summarizing. The skills are then incorporated within a problem-solving process that can be used to structure meetings between two or more people, especially those working together to support specific students. Numerous examples of this process are presented throughout the book, as are opportunities to practice the skills.This process is appropriate for any educator, parent, or person interested in improving communication while working with others to help students succeed. It is especially useful for teachers in cooperative teaching relationships and in collaborative relationships between general and special educators.
Teacher or Student Feedback on Collaborative Problem Solving Co-Author Ann Knackendoffel says, "The response from teachers in the field has been very supportive. They have been much more visionary than I was when I first created Collaborative Problem Solving and found a multitude of uses for the model beyond just their collaboration with general and special education teachers. They have found the process helpful with working one-on-one with colleagues, but they have been most enthusiastic about how it helps when they have multiple participants in a meeting such as a student improvement or IEP meeting. Teachers have also reported it useful when they are meeting with parents or working with students. They find the Problem-Solving Worksheet keeps them on task and focused on the problem rather than straying off into areas that detract from solution finding."
Author(s): E. Ann Knackendoffel, Suzanne M. Robinson, Donald D. Deshler, and Jean B. Schumaker
Publication Info: Edge Enterprises, 1992
Available from Edge Enterprises, Inc.
49 Accesses
1 Altmetric
Collaborative and Proactive Solutions (CPS)
The Collaborative Problem Solving model (CPS) was developed by Dr. Ross Greene and his colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Department of Psychiatry. The model was created as a reconceptualization of the factors that lead to challenging or oppositional behaviors, and a shift in the targets of intervention for these behaviors. Dr. Greene published the book The Explosive Child in 1998, which was the first detailed description of CPS. Multiple research studies (detailed below) have followed in the time since the book’s publication.
In the subsequent years there was a split between Dr. Greene and Massachusetts General Hospital. Massachusetts General Hospital has continued its work on CPS via the “Think:Kids” program under the direction of Dr. Stuart Ablon, who had previously collaborated with Dr. Greene. Dr. Greene has founded a nonprofit organization called “Lives in the Balance” to further his work on CPS, which...
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Becker, K., Chorpita, D., & Daleiden, B. (2011). Improvement in symptoms versus functioning: How do our best treatments measure up? Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, 38 (6), 440–458.
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Ollendick, T. H., Greene, R. W., Austin, K. E., Fraire, M. G., Halldorsdottir, T., Allen, K. B., Jarret, M. A., Lewis, K. M., Smith, M. W., Cunningham, N. R., Noguchi, R. J. P., Canavera, K., & Wolff, J. (2016). Parent management training and Collaborative & Proactive Solutions: A randomized control trial for oppositional youth. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 45 (5), 591–604.
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Rosen, B. (2020). Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS). In: Lebow, J., Chambers, A., Breunlin, D.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15877-8_1160-1
DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15877-8_1160-1
Received : 11 February 2020
Accepted : 12 February 2020
Published : 24 November 2020
Publisher Name : Springer, Cham
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Online ISBN : 978-3-319-15877-8
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magine this — a group of intrepid explorers embarks on a challenging mountain ascent. As they navigate rugged terrain and conquer obstacles together, a profound lesson unfolds — the strength lies not just in individual skills but in the harmonious synergy of collective effort. This adventure mirrors the essence of collaborative learning, where each participant contributes their unique expertise to conquer the peaks of knowledge.
Let's delve deep into the exhilarating journey of why collaboration is important in education, top collaborative learning benefits, and how to achieve real collective triumph through technologies.
Collaborative learning stands as a strategic approach rooted in group dynamics, bringing teams together to achieve a shared objective. A pivotal aspect of collaborative teaching strategy lies in showcasing the positive impact of individual autonomy and the expression of personal abilities while upholding personal responsibility. Within collaborative learning, students engage in joint efforts on tasks or projects.
Crucially, it's worth noting that students collaboratively contribute to a collective goal in this learning style, each tackling a distinct task . The concept hinges on individuals within this environment honing their skills, and witnessing firsthand how their contributions ripple through the group.
Beyond the academic realm, this collaborative synergy extends to the professional sphere, fostering camaraderie and fortifying bonds among teams. It becomes an avenue for individuals to acquaint themselves with their colleagues, gaining insights into both strengths and weaknesses.
This social interplay not only contributes to skill development but also cultivates essential interpersonal abilities like problem-solving, communication, and collaboration.
Collaborative learning makes the learning process enjoyable but also serves as an effective avenue for skill development. Here are ten key benefits of collaborative learning:
Collaborative learning projects often require groups to complete a task or solve a problem. Throughout this process, participants encounter a spectrum of potential solutions from individuals with diverse opinions and perspectives. People contribute unique ideas that their teammates might not have considered. Subsequently, the group engages in discussions and analysis to identify the best solution.
💡 Working on a problem or task as a group helps individuals develop their own problem-solving skills and discover new approaches to handling various work situations.
Effective collaborative learning groups necessitate teamwork. These groups may include individuals with different personality types. By working together and sharing ideas, participants can practice and enhance social skills such as active listening, empathy, and respect.
💡 Solid social skills contribute to the formation and maintenance of strong personal and professional relationships.
Collaborative learning typically brings together people from diverse backgrounds, beliefs, educational levels, and ages. This diversity can introduce new ideas and perspectives unique to one's culture or education.
💡 As a result, collaborative learning fosters open-mindedness and acceptance in the workplace.
Collaborative learning relies on effective communication to accomplish a task. Participants use verbal communication skills to share ideas, explain concepts, and provide clear and concise feedback. They also employ written communication skills if the task involves activities like group writing or peer editing.
💡 The more individuals practice communication skills in these environments, the stronger these skills tend to become.
The amalgamation of different viewpoints and ideas often results in creative solutions in collaborative learning tasks. An individual's idea or suggestion can inspire a new and creative thought from other team members. Collaborative learning nurtures this creative thinking by blending perspectives and personality types.
Imagine yourself in a product designers' brainstorming session at Apple. As the team discusses refining the user interface for a new device, one designer's concept for an intuitive navigation system might ignite a flurry of ideas from others.
💡 This collaborative exchange sparks creative synergies, culminating in the development of an innovative interface that seamlessly integrates user experience with cutting-edge design.
Collaborative learning groups must work together to achieve their goal, relying on each other for success. Consequently, they must learn to trust one another.
💡 This trust can carry over into future interactions in the workplace, potentially leading to increased productivity and morale.
When working in a group, team members support each other as they progress toward a common goal. Collaborative learning can be particularly beneficial for shy, anxious, or introverted individuals.
💡 A supportive group atmosphere can help them build confidence, encouraging them to share their opinions and contribute to discussions. Consequently, their confidence may grow as they realize their value to the group.
Successful collaborative learning requires the participation of all participants. It encourages passive individuals to become more involved and active in the project or discussion.
This type of learning is an effective way to engage quiet or inactive peers, making them more interested and involved in a project.
💡 Engaged individuals in their work are often more productive and have a more positive attitude.
Learning in a group is more enjoyable and less tedious than reading training materials, listening to a lecture, or watching an instructional video alone. Many collaborative learning activities include fun tasks such as solving puzzles, role-playing, and games.
For instance, in a virtual group project where students collaborate on a case study, they engage in lively discussions via video conferencing, share diverse perspectives through online forums, and simulate problem-solving scenarios using interactive tools. During collaborative learning exercises, teams often feel more comfortable, relaxed, and capable of laughing and having fun.
💡 When learning experiences are enjoyable, people are more likely to remember what they learned and look forward to learning more in the future.
Collaborative learning can encourage participants to think at a higher level. They must analyze and discuss information to make the best decision or solve a problem. By having to explain their ideas and interpret and evaluate others' ideas, individuals can improve their critical thinking skills.
💡 Critical thinking is crucial for conflict resolution, idea generation, and ensuring projects are completed smoothly and efficiently.
Collaborative learning leads to forging new friendships and strengthening existing relationships. It often brings together people who might not have met or worked together under normal circumstances.
As team members spend time working together on a collaborative learning project, they get to know each other better. This can lead to positive personal and professional relationships and higher morale.
Lastly, if a supervisor or teacher participates in or leads the collaborative learning effort, it can help that person better understand their employees and strengthen their professional relationships.
Utilizing technology has the potential to significantly enhance the advantages of collaborative learning, providing innovative solutions to connect and involve students in meaningful ways. Digital platforms play a pivotal role in fostering cooperation and engagement within the educational landscape.
Utilizing learning management systems such as EducateMe , Canvas, Moodle, etc., goes beyond simple collaboration in education; these platforms serve as comprehensive hubs for organizing and delivering educational resources. Moreover, they provide valuable insights into student progress and performance, enabling educators to tailor their teaching methods to address individual needs effectively.
Digital platforms such as Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom exemplify the power of real-time collaboration, streamlining the process for students to cooperate seamlessly. Through these platforms, students can effortlessly work together, share resources, and engage in discussions, transcending geographical constraints for a more inclusive learning environment.
Incorporating interactive learning tools like Kahoot, Quizlet, and Padlet introduces an element of gamification into the learning process, transforming education into an interactive and engaging experience. For instance, Kahoot allows educators to create quizzes with competitive elements, fostering a sense of excitement and competition among students, ultimately enhancing their retention of information.
Artificial intelligence technologies can be employed to create personalized learning experiences for students even in collaborative learning. AI algorithms can analyze individual learning styles and preferences, tailoring educational content to meet the specific needs of each student. This fosters a more adaptive and inclusive learning environment, where students can progress at their own pace and focus on areas that require additional attention.
Integrating virtual reality into collaborative learning brings a new dimension to education. Students can engage in immersive experiences, such as virtual group field trips or simulations, fostering a deeper understanding of complex concepts. For example, exploring ancient civilizations through a virtual tour or conducting virtual science experiments enhances the educational journey, making it more captivating and memorable.
Discover more about the best technologies for collaborative learning in our guide “ 10+ Best Collaborative Learning Tools for 2023 ”.
In the words of Helen Keller, "Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." The crux of collaborative learning lies in this conviction of the potency of teamwork and collective intelligence.
Collaborative learning presents a multitude of advantages and holds the potential to revolutionize the contemporary education system. Educators can amplify student engagement and improve learning outcomes significantly by implementing technology capabilities.
Here, EducateMe collaborative LMS will be your perfect partner. Discover its collaborative learning capabilities , or simply give it a spin with a free trial version .
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Title: cps-taskforge: generating collaborative problem solving environments for diverse communication tasks.
Abstract: Teams can outperform individuals; could adding AI teammates further bolster performance of teams solving problems collaboratively? Collaborative problem solving (CPS) research commonly studies teams with two agents (human-human or human-AI), but team research literature finds that, for complex tasks, larger teams are more effective. Progress in studying collaboration with more than two agents, through textual records of team interactions, is hindered by a major data challenge: available CPS corpora are predominantly dyadic, and adapting pre-existing CPS tasks to more agents is non-trivial. We address this data challenge by developing a CPS task generator, CPS-TaskForge, that can produce environments for studying CPS under a wide array of conditions, and releasing a CPS task design checklist grounded in the theoretical PISA 2015 CPS framework to help facilitate the development of CPS corpora with more agents. CPS-TaskForge takes the form of a resource management (tower defense) game, and different CPS tasks can be studied by manipulating game design parameters. We conduct a case study with groups of 3-4 humans to validate production of diverse natural language CPS communication in a game instance produced by CPS-TaskForge. We discuss opportunities for advancing research in CPS (both with human-only and human-AI teams) using different task configurations. We will release data and code.
Subjects: | Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) |
Cite as: | [cs.HC] |
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Improving emotional intelligence (eq), anger management: help for anger issues.
Are you or someone you know in crisis?
Causes of conflict in a relationship, how do you respond to conflict, conflict resolution, stress, and emotions, core skill 1: quick stress relief, core skill 2: emotional awareness, nonverbal communication and conflict resolution, more tips for managing and resolving conflict, conflict resolution skills.
Whatever the cause of disagreements and disputes at home or work, these skills can help you resolve conflict in a constructive way and keep your relationships strong and growing.
Conflict is a normal part of any healthy relationship. After all, two people can’t be expected to agree on everything, all the time. The key is not to fear or try to avoid conflict but to learn how to resolve it in a healthy way.
When conflict is mismanaged, it can cause great harm to a relationship, but when handled in a respectful, positive way, conflict provides an opportunity to strengthen the bond between two people. Whether you’re experiencing conflict at home, work, or school, learning these skills can help you resolve differences in a healthy way and build stronger, more rewarding relationships.
Conflict arises from differences, both large and small. It occurs whenever people disagree over their values, motivations, perceptions, ideas, or desires. Sometimes these differences appear trivial, but when a conflict triggers strong feelings, a deep personal need is often at the core of the problem. These needs can range from the need to feel safe and secure or respected and valued, to the need for greater closeness and intimacy.
Think about the opposing needs of a toddler and a parent. The child’s need is to explore, so venturing to the street or the cliff edge meets that need. But the parent’s need is to protect the child’s safety, a need that can only be met by limiting the toddler’s exploration. Since these needs are at odds, conflict arises.
The needs of each party play an important role in the long-term success of a relationship. Each deserves respect and consideration. In personal relationships, a lack of understanding about differing needs can result in distance, arguments, and break-ups. In the workplace, differing needs can result in broken deals, decreased profits, and lost jobs.
[Read: Tips for Building a Healthy Relationship]
When you can recognize conflicting needs and are willing to examine them with compassion and understanding, it can lead to creative problem solving, team building, and stronger relationships.
BetterHelp is an online therapy service that matches you to licensed, accredited therapists who can help with depression, anxiety, relationships, and more. Take the assessment and get matched with a therapist in as little as 48 hours.
Do you fear conflict or avoid it at all costs? If your perception of conflict comes from painful memories from early childhood or previous unhealthy relationships, you may expect all disagreements to end badly. You may view conflict as demoralizing, humiliating, or something to fear. If your early life experiences left you feeling powerless or out of control, conflict may even be traumatizing for you.
If you’re afraid of conflict, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you enter a conflict situation already feeling threatened, it’s tough to deal with the problem at hand in a healthy way. Instead, you’re more likely to either shut down or blow up in anger.
Unhealthy responses to conflict: | Healthy responses to conflict: |
---|---|
An inability to recognize and respond to the things that matter to the other person. | The capacity to empathize with the other person’s viewpoint. |
Explosive, angry, hurtful, and resentful reactions. | Calm, non-defensive, and respectful reactions. |
The withdrawal of love, resulting in rejection, isolation, shaming, and fear of abandonment. | A readiness to forgive and forget, and to move past the conflict without holding resentments or anger. |
An inability to compromise or see the other person’s side. | The ability to seek compromise and avoid punishing. |
Feeling fearful or avoiding conflict; expecting a bad outcome. | A belief that facing conflict head on is the best thing for both sides. |
Conflict triggers strong emotions and can lead to hurt feelings, disappointment, and discomfort. When handled in an unhealthy manner, it can cause irreparable rifts, resentments, and break-ups. But when conflict is resolved in a healthy way, it increases your understanding of the other person, builds trust, and strengthens your relationships.
If you are out of touch with your feelings or so stressed that you can only pay attention to a limited number of emotions, you won’t be able to understand your own needs. This will make it hard to communicate with others and establish what’s really troubling you. For example, couples often argue about petty differences—the way she hangs the towels, the way he slurps his soup—rather than what is really bothering them.
To successfully resolve a conflict, you need to learn and practice two core skills:
Being able to manage and relieve stress in the moment is the key to staying balanced, focused, and in control, no matter what challenges you face. If you don’t know how to stay centered and in control of yourself, you will become overwhelmed in conflict situations and unable to respond in healthy ways.
Psychologist Connie Lillas uses a driving analogy to describe the three most common ways people respond when they’re overwhelmed by stress:
Foot on the gas. An angry or agitated stress response. You’re heated, keyed up, overly emotional, and unable to sit still.
Foot on the brake. A withdrawn or depressed stress response. You shut down, space out, and show very little energy or emotion.
Foot on both gas and brake. A tense and frozen stress response. You “freeze” under pressure and can’t do anything. You look paralyzed, but under the surface you’re extremely agitated.
Stress interferes with the ability to resolve conflict by limiting your ability to:
You may be so used to feeling stressed that you’re not even aware you are stressed. Stress may pose a problem in your life if you identify with the following:
One of the most reliable ways to rapidly reduce stress is by engaging one or more of your senses—sight, sound, taste, smell, touch—or through movement. You could squeeze a stress ball, smell a relaxing scent, taste a soothing cup of tea, or look at a treasured photograph. We all tend to respond differently to sensory input, often depending on how we respond to stress, so take some time to find things that are soothing to you. Read: Quick Stress Relief .
Emotional awareness is the key to understanding yourself and others. If you don’t know how or why you feel a certain way, you won’t be able to communicate effectively or resolve disagreements.
[Read: Improving Emotional Intelligence]
Although knowing your own feelings may sound simple, many people ignore or try to sedate strong emotions like anger, sadness, and fear. Your ability to handle conflict, however, depends on being connected to these feelings. If you’re afraid of strong emotions or if you insist on finding solutions that are strictly rational, your ability to face and resolve differences will be limited.
Emotional awareness—the consciousness of your moment-to-moment emotional experience—and the ability to manage all of your feelings appropriately, is the basis of a communication process that can resolve conflict.
Emotional awareness helps you to:
The following quiz helps you assess your level of emotional awareness. Answer the following questions with: almost never, occasionally, often, very often, or almost always . There are no right or wrong responses, only the opportunity to become better acquainted with your emotional responses.
If any of these experiences are unfamiliar, your emotions may be “turned” down or even off. In either case, you may need help developing your emotional awareness. You can do this by using Helpguide’s free Emotional Intelligence Toolkit.
When people are in the middle of a conflict, the words they use rarely convey the issues at the heart of the problem. But by paying close attention to the other person’s nonverbal signals or “body language,” such as facial expressions, posture, gestures, and tone of voice, you can better understand what the person is really saying. This will allow you to respond in a way that builds trust, and gets to the root of the problem.
[Read: Nonverbal Communication and Body Language]
Your ability to accurately read another person depends on your own emotional awareness. The more aware you are of your own emotions, the easier it will be for you to pick up on the wordless clues that reveal what others are feeling. Think about what you are transmitting to others during conflict, and if what you say matches your body language. If you say “I’m fine,” but you clench your teeth and look away, then your body is clearly signaling you are anything but “fine.” A calm tone of voice, a reassuring touch, or an interested facial expression can go a long way toward relaxing a tense exchange.
You can ensure that the process of managing and resolving conflict is as positive as possible by sticking to the following guidelines:
Listen for what is felt as well as said. When you really listen, you connect more deeply to your own needs and emotions, and to those of other people. Listening also strengthens, informs, and makes it easier for others to hear you when it’s your turn to speak.
Make conflict resolution the priority rather than winning or “being right.” Maintaining and strengthening the relationship, rather than “winning” the argument, should always be your first priority. Be respectful of the other person and their viewpoint.
Focus on the present. If you’re holding on to grudges based on past conflicts, your ability to see the reality of the current situation will be impaired. Rather than looking to the past and assigning blame, focus on what you can do in the here-and-now to solve the problem.
Pick your battles. Conflicts can be draining, so it’s important to consider whether the issue is really worth your time and energy. Maybe you don’t want to surrender a parking space if you’ve been circling for 15 minutes, but if there are dozens of empty spots, arguing over a single space isn’t worth it.
Be willing to forgive. Resolving conflict is impossible if you’re unwilling or unable to forgive others. Resolution lies in releasing the urge to punish, which can serve only to deplete and drain your life.
Know when to let something go. If you can’t come to an agreement, agree to disagree. It takes two people to keep an argument going. If a conflict is going nowhere, you can choose to disengage and move on.
You can avoid many confrontations and resolve arguments and disagreements by communicating in a humorous way . Humor can help you say things that might otherwise be difficult to express without offending someone. However, it’s important that you laugh with the other person, not at them. When humor and play are used to reduce tension and anger, reframe problems, and put the situation into perspective, the conflict can actually become an opportunity for greater connection and intimacy.
Using laughter and play to resolve disagreements
Boost your EQ to help find happiness and success
Tips and techniques for getting anger under control
How to feel and respond to the emotions of others
Tips for building communication skills
How to read body language to build better relationships at home and work
What they are and how they influence relationships
5 ways to deal with gaslighting
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On the basis of these results, recommendations are made for further study and instruction to better support students' critical thinking in the context of collaborative problem-solving.
Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is composed of two main elements: the collaborative, sharing, or social aspects coupled with the knowledge or cognitive aspects. Thus, the primary distinction between individual problem solving and collaborative problem solving is the social component.
individual problem solving in PISA 2012. However, today's workplaces also demand people who can solve problems in concert and collaboration with others by combining their ideas and efforts. Collaborative problem solving has several advantages over individual problem solving: labour can be divided among team members; a variety of knowledge, perspectives and experiences can be applied to try ...
Collaborative problem solving—and more generally, collaboration—has gained increasing attention in national and international assessments (e.g., PISA) as an educational priority encompassing social, emotional, and cognitive skills critical to efficiency, effectiveness, and innovation in the modern global economy ( Graesser et al. 2018; OECD ...
Collaborative problem-solving competency is . . . the capacity of an individual to effectively engage in a process whereby two or more agents attempt to solve a problem by sharing the understanding and effort required to come to a solution, and pooling their knowledge, skills and efforts to reach that solution.
Collaborative problem solving opens communication and builds trust in the relationship as you and your co-collaborator discover that you are both working together toward a shared outcome.
Highlights • Epistemic network analysis was used to analyze students' collaborative problem solving processes. • Both the high and low academic performance groups worked to maintain positive communication. • Differences in CPS strategies led to the differences between the high and low academic performance groups. Abstract Collaborative problem solving, as a key competency in the 21st ...
To solve any problem—whether personal (eg, deciding where to live), business-related (eg, raising product prices), or societal (eg, reversing the obesity epidemic)—it's crucial to first define the problem. In a team setting, that translates to establishing a collective understanding of the problem, awareness of context, and alignment of ...
Developmental stages in creating collaborative problem-solving instruments. Our recommendations list the necessary developmental stages of the CPS instruments, which can be summarized as follows: In the case of H-H instruments, the first version of the assessment tool should permit open-ended discussion;
Want to understand collaborative problem solving? Then take a look at this guide from MindManager. We'll show you how to solve problems as a team.
A collaborative problem-solving space must include a rich set of services for communication and information exchange in order to support the dynamics of collaborating with other actors.
Discourse, especially dialogic communication between students in collaborative problem-solving groups, plays a central role in educational reforms informed by learning science. This study examined the quality of discourse in problem-based learning groups in a university course. The study found a low incidence of high quality dialogue (dialogic ...
The Collaborative Problem Solving Approach. The Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) approach represents a novel, practical, compassionate, and highly effective model for helping challenging children and those who work and live with them. The CPS approach was first articulated in the widely read book, The Explosive Child [ 3 ], and subsequently ...
How can educators improve training and testing of collaborative problem-solving? Drawing from disciplines that study cognition, collaboration and learning, have been studying teamwork processes.
Abstract The literature and the employee and workforce surveys rank collaborative problem solving (CPS) among the top 5 most critical skills necessary for success in college and the workforce. This...
Definition Collaborative problem solving or collaborative coping refers to two (or more) people working together as a unit to solve a problem or cope with a stressor. It is a direct and active form of dyadic coping, as both dyad members invest resources to gather and evaluate information, jointly discuss options, and work together in implementing strategies and solutions. The joint and equal ...
Collaborative Problem Solving: Social and Developmental Considerations. Skill at solving complex problems in teams of people with varying backgrounds and expertise is needed to address many of the pressing social, environmental, health, resource, and economic problems in the world today. There are several indicators of this new reality.
The first expression means that technology enhances communication, collaboration, and coordination within a peer group, while collaborative technology refers to various software designed to structure peer dialogue, support the thinking process, and present information needed for problem-solving.
Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) is an evidence-based approach that focuses on understanding and addressing the root causes of challenging behavior in children and adolescents. Developed by Dr. Ross Greene, CPS aims to foster empathy, communication, and collaboration between parents, children, and professionals, ultimately leading to more effective and lasting solutions for family issues ...
Collaborative work lends itself to innovation and problem-solving. Improved, open communication. Collaboration isn't possible with communication. But good collaboration happens when communication is open, transparent, and effective. Communication can break down silos between teams to help better solve problems.
Collaborative Problem Solving. The key to solving shared problems relies, in large measure, in the communication skills of the people associated with those problems. Although designed specifically for use in educational settings, Collaborative Problem Solving outlines the communication skills needed to solve problems within any group.
The Collaborative Problem Solving model (CPS) was developed by Dr. Ross Greene and his colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital's Department of Psychiatry. The model was created as a reconceptualization of the factors that lead to challenging or oppositional behaviors, and a shift in the targets of intervention for these behaviors.
10 Benefits of Collaborative Learning Collaborative learning makes the learning process enjoyable but also serves as an effective avenue for skill development. Here are ten key benefits of collaborative learning: #1. Enhancing Problem-Solving Skills Collaborative learning projects often require groups to complete a task or solve a problem. Throughout this process, participants encounter a ...
Collaborative problem solving (CPS) research commonly studies teams with two agents (human-human or human-AI), but team research literature finds that, for complex tasks, larger teams are more effective. ... We conduct a case study with groups of 3-4 humans to validate production of diverse natural language CPS communication in a game instance ...
Effective Communication: Improving Your Interpersonal Skills ... a deep personal need is often at the core of the problem. These needs can range from the need to feel safe and secure or respected and valued, to the need for greater closeness and intimacy. ... it can lead to creative problem solving, team building, and stronger relationships. ...