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What Is Collaborative Learning?
"Collaborative learning is a term that is used for a variety of educational approaches involving joint intellectual effort by students or students working together with teachers."
Assumptions about Learning:
- Learning is an active process. In order to learn new information, students need to integrate what they already know with new materials and use them in purposeful ways.
- Learning depends on rich contexts. Collaborative learning activities immerse students in challenging tasks and questions.
- Learners are diverse. Each student brings different backgrounds, learning styles and experiences to the classroom.
- Learning is inherently social. "talking is where much of the learning occurs."
Goals for Education:
- Involvement.
- Collaborative learning is socially and intellectually involving, it helps students build closer connections with other students and faculty.
Cooperative Learning Approaches:
- Cooperative learning
- "The instructional use of small groups so that students work together to maximize their own and each other's understanding."
- The development of social skills in group work-learning to cooperate is crucial to high quality of group work.
- Problem Centered Instruction:
- Writing Groups:
- Both in theory and practice, the most concentrated effort in undergraduate collaborative learning has focused on the teaching of writing.
- Peer Teaching: (three most successful models)
o Supplemental Instruction (Deanna Martin, Univ. of Missouri Kansas City)
- Focuses on "at-risk classes"
- Invites bright undergrads who have done well in the class to become "SI leaders"
o Writing Fellows (Tori-Haring Smith, Brown University)
- Upper division students who are strong writers, are called "writing fellows"
- They are extensively trained and then deployed into classes to help students with their papers ('bottom-up approach")
o Mathematics Workshops (Uri Treisman, Univ. of California - Berkeley)
- This intensive small group workshop approach emphasizes developing strength and peer collaboration rather than solo competition.
- It reversed the prevailing patterns of failure by Hispanic and Black students in calculus classes at Berkeley.
- Discussion Groups and Seminars:
o "The purposeful restructuring of the curriculum to link together courses so that students find a greater coherence in what they are learnin'g and increase their interaction with faculty and fellow students.
o Learning communities also confront many problems:
- Fragmentation of general education classes
- Isolation of students
- Lack of a meaningful connection between classes
- The need for greater interaction between students and faculty
- Lack of sustained opportunities for faculty development
- Challenges and Opportunities:
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