Phenomenological Studies: Strategies for Improving Indonesian Pre-Service Teacher Collaboration Skills

The efforts to empower collaboration skills are still a challenge for educational study programs in Indonesia. Various studies have focused more on efforts to improve collaboration skills, not exploring how lecturers' strategies are in training students' collaboration skills. This study aims to: 1) describe the lecturer's strategy for improving student collaboration skills, 2) describe the weaknesses of student collaboration skills, and 3) describe the lecturer's obstacles in improving student collaboration skills. There were 10 Biology Education lecturers involved in this phenomenology study. Data were collected through in-depth interviews and documentation and analyzed using the thematic analysis technique. The results showed that PjBL was the lecturers' most widely used learning strategy in improving student collaboration skills compared to other strategies. Specific strategies, such as implementing Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), were also adopted to promote student collaboration skills. PRA is used to optimize collaboration planning while coordinating student workloads. The results also show that students still experience various obstacles, especially in terms of communication, conflict resolution, and the formulation of collaboration results. The phenomenon of student participation inequalities is still a common problem for various universities. The factors causing the problems found included limited lecturer assistance, obstacles in preparing and developing assessment instruments, as well as obstacles in online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. This finding is expected to be used as a reference for lecturers and researchers in developing student collaborative learning strategies.