What Does Education Look Like When We Prioritize Cooperation and Collaboration?

<p>In this episode of Agile Ed, we ask what education might look like if we stopped organizing so much of it around competition and started prioritizing cooperation and collaboration instead.</p><p>We explore the ways competition is baked into academic culture—from authorship and intellectual property to teaching, grading, and the pressure to protect our own ideas—and what can happen when we deliberately push against those norms. Along the way, we turn the conversation toward course design: collaborative learning, group formation, student choice, feedback, grading, and creating opportunities for students to learn <em>with</em> one another rather than simply alongside or against one another.</p><p>We also get practical about the realities of doing this work. What happens when class sizes grow, TA support shrinks, and the course you imagined is no longer sustainable? Drawing on our lasagna model for sustainable teaching, we reflect on how relationships, scaffolding, productive failure, and intrinsic motivation can help us decide what really matters and ultimately what we can let go.</p><p>It’s a conversation about de-centering ourselves, sharing ownership of learning, and designing educational experiences that make cooperation more than something we say we value.</p><p> <strong>Attributions</strong></p><p>Megan Barker (colleague mentioned regarding approaches to group formation): <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/megan-barker-a9661960/">linkedin.com/in/megan-barker-a9661960/</a> </p>