ORGANISE THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT TO ENCOURAGE MEANINGFUL COLLABORATION
What does this mean?
To collaborate is to work with others towards the achievement of a shared goal. Collaborative learning requires careful planning to ensure interactions between students are purposeful and learning focused.
The learning environment can be organised to support collaborative working, for example, through the use of writable walls and desks, show-me boards and digital whiteboards, and at a most basic level, classroom structure and layout.
Collaborative approaches are most effective when students are accountable individually for their contribution to a process of collective learning. Tasks that encourage students to explain their thinking and elaborate on each other’s ideas often enhance collaboration. Peer assessment, especially paired feedback and retrieval routines, are among the most beneficial forms of student collaboration in the classroom.
Research on classroom-based group work reveals a paradox: it has shown that collaborative learning can be very effective for curriculum learning, but that simply putting children together to work in groups is unproductive. The paradox can be resolved in the realisation that children will only work well together if they have learned how to do so; and that is only likely to be the case if they have been taught the relevant oracy skills.
Neil Mercer
Why is this important?
CAREFULLY PLANNED, STRUCTURED AND MONITORED COLLABORATION:
- Supports interactions between students that are beneficial to learning.
- Contributes to a process of shared knowledge building.
- Encourages students to explain their ideas to each other and elaborate on their views.
- Develops a classroom culture of peer support and critique.
- Fosters interdependence among students and a sense of mutuality.
- Promotes collective responsibility and individual accountability.
- Aids metacognition, especially where prompts and scripts are provided to scaffold student interaction.
While there is a general consensus among researchers about the positive effects of co-operative learning on student achievement, there remains a controversy about why and how they affect achievement and, most importantly, under what conditions they have these effects.
Robert Slavin
