Students negotiating and designing their collaborative learning norms: a group developmental perspective in learning communities

This research shows how participants in classroom learning communities (LCs) come to take responsibility over designing their collaborative learning norms. Taking a micro-developmental perspective within a graduate-level course, we examined fine-grained changes in group discourse during a period of rapid change where this responsibility taking occurs, which we frame as the transition between the storming and norming stages of group development. Our findings indicate that this transition was based upon three sub-stages that included (a) recognition of a group crisis; (b) acceptance of responsibility; and (c) increased meaningfulness of norms. As an outcome of this transition, LC members took responsibility over negotiating and designing their collaborative norms as authority moved from moderators to students. We discuss the theoretical and practical contributions of this research on group development and LCs, as well as limitations and next steps for research.