Collaborative Learning

Students come into our program at all levels of ability and experience. Some have an intuitive sense of timing and spacing while others love animation, but have never considered the actual process of breaking down a movement into frames. As in any course with widely diverging skill levels, creating an environment where the more advanced learners are challenged while the less experienced are not left behind is a teaching conundrum. My approach in the Intro to Animation course is to immediately place students into a collaborative learning environment. 

After introducing the Animation Fundamentals (my version of the 12 Principles) in reading and class lectures, our first big assignment is a Group Stopmotion Extravaganza. The prompt is as follows:

You are a small stop-motion studio commissioned to create a 15–20 second animation for Instagram. Your goal is to reinvent an ordinary object and turn it into something unexpected that surprises and delights the audience.

To prepare, we watch work by PES and Jan Svankmajer and students individually complete a series of basic timing exercises, which get them familiar with the Dragonframe interface and the Animation Fundamentals. But my secret agenda for this group project right at the beginning of the semester is that it levels the playing field through collaborative learning.

Collaborative learning, which is different than group projects, focuses on students collectively searching for creative solutions as they explore and apply the course material in a setting of mutual accountability.

From one of the seminal texts on the subject: “Collaborative learning has as its main feature a structure that allows for student talk: students are supposed to talk with each other….and it is in this talking that much of the learning occurs.” (Golub, 1988)

While Golub is referring to students learning how to write through listening to each other talk, the idea that conversation can enhance student learning applies across disciplines. I’m sitting in the animation lab as I write this post, listening to groups of students talk to each other as they animate objects under the camera. They are thinking out loud, discussing how fast or slow something should move, what arc it will follow, how to apply squash and stretch. Those that have already incorporated words like “easing” and “anticipation” into their vocabulary, use those words in context and other students adapt to that vocabulary.

For this particular project, I find three is the magic number for group dynamics. With three, everyone has something to do and everyone’s opinion is heard. Every student has to animate some part of the final piece, though they are allowed to divide up the work according to their strengths and weaknesses. Inevitably, the confident, experienced animators do a lot of the moving and the less confident animators do more of the camera work and constructing of backgrounds. Though this may not seem “fair” on the surface, I’ve noticed that these less confident students absorb a lot from watching their peers make decisions about timing and spacing. The experienced students do a good deal of one-on-one instruction in directing the animation, attention which I could never give to every student who needs it.

I’ve found that the key to making this not a burden for the more experienced students is to make the environment low stress. If the project isn’t rushed, the capable students won’t try to take over and finish it themselves, but will patiently direct the less experienced students and help them make excellent animation.

The other residual benefit of this collaborative project is that everyone is crammed in the lab for several hours working energetically and the class sort of comes together as a cohort. So the rest of the semester there’s a level of familiarity that makes critique more comfortable and the classroom atmosphere more collaborative as a whole. Even though out class is primarily focused on drawn animation, this initial stopmotion project targets a lot of our learning goals in an efficient way.

At the end of the project, I ask students to take an individual survey with the following questions:

For you personally, what do you feel like you learned the most from this project? The “what you learned” questions seem corny, but students take ownership over their outcomes by articulating them, and the project becomes more than just an assignment.

How did you divide the work in your group? Did you feel there was a fair input on everyone’s part? Which part of the project did you animate? Were your ideas discussed as a group and completed as a group? This is a chance for group members to anonymously let me know if someone wasn’t contributing, but it also asks students to think specifically about their roles in the group and how different roles can still achieve a balanced contribution.

What do you feel was your biggest contribution to the project? This helps students to specifically articulate their strengths and how they approached the project.

Anything else you’d like me to know, or suggestions for future classes that do this project? This question has helped me hone the project over the years to where it runs pretty smoothly!

How do you work collaborative learning into your classes?

References:

Golub, Jeff. “Focus on Collaborative Learning: Classroom Practices in Teaching English.” Focus on Collaborative Learning: Classroom Practices in Teaching English, National Council of Teachers of English, 1989, pp. 1–1.