Collaborative Learning

Collaborative Learning

Collaborative learning is a vital aspect of education. The concept of communication is the foundation to learning anything, as you must be able to do this in order to listen, and therefore to learn. (Barnes, 1976, p.73) Furthermore, in addition to listening, the skill of being able to speak to others helps children to truly begin to understand things that they are taught, through discussion (Lloyd & Beard, 1995).

However, there is much more to collaborative learning in schools than students simply discussing ideas together (Laal & Laal, 2012). It is referring to the concept of students working together as a group to reach a mutual goal, with equal contributions from everyone (Smith, 1995). Furthermore, this is very different to cooperative learning, a strategy that is based more on students splitting a larger task and assigning the different segments to the different members of the group, and then piecing the final goal back together once each person has completed their part (Roschelle & Teasley, 1995).

            A lot of work done during lectures and seminars can be linked closely with collaborative learning. For example, in a recent lecture we worked as a whole course to create a fictional story; a task that is perfect for using in the classroom. To do this, the lecturer asked questions such as ‘think of a character’, ‘where do they live?’, and ‘what do they do?’ and chose different students to share their ideas. This resulted in us creating a story that involved everyone’s contributions. The benefits of this were that we were able to pool together ideas in order to create the best possible final result. This idea of sharing ideas and thoughts could be used in the classroom to not only enhance but also to ease a child’s experiences of education, for example in terms of essay planning. Below is a photograph of our course during the lecture. As you can see, a student at the front is holding up a drawing. He mentioned that he enjoys drawing and therefore spent the lecture illustrating the story that we were telling – this highlights the fact that collaborative learning allows different people to use their personal strengths to benefit the overall goal in the best way.

Furthermore, in recent seminars we also worked collaborative to make 'stop motion' videos. These videos involved working together to create characters using lego and play dough, and backdrops using green screens. Four of us worked as a group to create the final video. This activity was collaborative rather than cooperative because, although there were different tasks that needed completing, we all worked together on each task rather than distributing the tasks amongst ourselves. Below is the video we created, which is simple but demonstrates the different skills our group shared.

Although collaborative learning clearly improves social skills in education (examples of which are shown below), a recent study conducted on 12-15 year olds found no evidence to support the idea that groups of students working together has a positive impact on academic achievement (Roseth et al, 2006). However, it could be argued that scientific evidence is not required in an education context, as practitioners can physically see the effect that different learning styles have on their pupils.

It is also emphasised that actions must be put into place to ensure the success of collaborative learning - it cannot just be assumed that allowing students to work together will give top results. These actions have been simplified down to ‘five conditions’ which are as follows;

’· Clearly perceived positive interdependence;
· Considerable promotive interaction;
· Clearly perceived individual accountability and personal responsibility to achieve the group’s goals;
· Frequent use of the relevant interpersonal and small-group skills, and;
· Frequent and regular group processing of current functioning to improve the group’s future effectiveness.’

(Johnsons, 1994)

            With all of these conditions in place, collaborative learning can be beneficial in ways which fit into four categories; social e.g. creating a supporting and understanding relationship between both practitioners and students, psychological e.g. helping children to overcome anxieties through cooperation, academic e.g. encouraging children to think critically about topics’ (Johnsons, 1989, and Pantiz, 1999).

            I will further explore the use of technology alongside collaborative learning in a following post.

References

Barnes, D. (1976) From Communication to curriculum. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Johnson, D.W. & Johnson, R.T. (1989). Cooperation and Competition Theory and Research. Edina, Minnesota; USA. Interaction Book Co. publishing.

Johnson, R. T., and Johnson, D. W. (1994). An overview of cooperative learning. In Thousand, J., Villa, A. & Nevin, A. (Eds.), Creativity and collaborative learning (p.2). Baltimore, Maryland; USA. Brookes Publishing.

Laal, M., & Laal, M. (2012). Collaborative learning: what is it?. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 31, 491-495.

Lloyd, C., & Beard, J. (1995). Managing classroom collaboration. (Cassell Practical Handbooks). London: Cassell.

Panitz, T.(1999). Benefits of Cooperative Learning in Relation to Student Motivation", in Theall, M. (Ed.) Motivationfrom within: Approaches for encouraging faculty and students to excel, New directions for teaching and learning. San Francisco, CA; USA. Josey-Bass publishing.

Roschelle, J., & Teasley, S. D. (1995). The construction of shared knowledge in collaborative problem solving. In Computer-supported collaborative learning (Vol. 128, pp. 69-197).

Roseth, C. J., Fang, F., Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T. (2006). Effects of cooperative learning on middle school students: A meta-analysis. San Francisco: American Educational Research Association Convention.

Smith, K. A. (1995). Cooperative learning: Effective teamwork for engineering classrooms. In Frontiers in Education Conference, 1995. Proceedings., 1995 (Vol. 1, pp. 2b5-13). IEEE.