Peer Collaboration

Students are encouraged to collaborate and work in teams in many classes at MIT to practice explaining concepts and learn from one another. However, the skills to work effectively with others are complex, so it can help to address them explicitly. The syllabus can highlight the benefits of working collaboratively and provide guidance to support effective teamwork. Collaborative learning activities provide opportunities for students to interact as peers and identify shared interests in subject content. Acknowledging the value of students learning from one another helps to increase students’ sense of belonging. 

Key Features:

  • Clear benefits of collaboration and/or the value of learning from peers
  • Clear descriptions of opportunities students will have to interact as peers, identify shared interests in subject content, and collaborate
  • Support for creating study groups (e.g., pset partners)
  • Clear guidelines to help students navigate collaborative or team-based learning activities

MIT Examples:

Image that show that students page think they know only a small portion of what others know, but usually they have a lot of overlapping knowledge with others.
Illustration by Peter Dourmashkin

Scrum meetings: Also known as ‘stand-up-meetings’, scrum meetings are commonly used by design teams to improve communication and collaboration in fast paced projects. They are short meetings, typically at the beginning of a given day, which inspect progress toward the team goals and adjust the upcoming planned work accordingly. In 1.101, the teams will conduct scrum meetings at the beginning of every design session. In these short (~5 minute) meetings the team will cover 3 topics:

  1. Updates on progress since previous session.
  2. Share specific challenges or issues that were identified and propose improvements.
  3. Share understanding of goals – this includes broad goals of the project and specific goals and action items for the session.

A member of the staff should be present for the scrum meeting. Each session, a different student in the team is responsible to lead the meeting.

Let’s Talk

If you have any questions or want to talk through your syllabus, please contact Teaching + Learning Lab, GradSupport (for graduate courses), or S3 (for undergraduate courses). If you want to go deeper, please visit the TLL’s Syllabus Checklist to Support Student Belonging & Achievement, a comprehensive, evidence-based syllabus checklist which informed this resource.

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