The opportunities for learning that collaborative classrooms offer have been discussed by educators in different venues. Some of these opportunities include the potential for taking a more active role in one’s own learning, developing critical thinking, and increasing participation.
To state that students will be more active or think more critically simply by being in a collaborative classroom, however, seems to be wishful thinking. Careful planning is necessary for successful collaboration. In order to benefit from a collaborative classroom, students must have the skills necessary to participate effectively, and those skills need to be explicitly taught. Students are not born with the ability to collaborate on academic tasks, just as they are not born with the ability to learn from lectures alone (which lie on the direction end of the direction-collaboration continuum).
If a student is not prepared to participate effectively in collaborative tasks, he or she may go through the movements of collaboration without really engaging in any of its meaningful processes – and therefore without gaining anything valuable from the experience. Unprepared students may leave the thinking to a few high-performing classmates and just sit on the sidelines waiting for a solution; or they may over-criticize the work of their peers and thus make it less likely that other students will participate.
In collaborative environments, students need to move back and forth across a variety of roles. At different points in time, a student may be presenting information, solving a problem, attending to someone else’s input, or evaluating a group solution. Because of the shared responsibility expected in collaborative classrooms, students are also tasked with guiding others into expressing themselves technically rather than colloquially. That means that students need to know how to “draw” a peer into putting the information into technical terms (see Ferster & Perrott, 1968). Essentially, students become either active listeners or active problem solvers at different points in the collaborative effort, and they may or may not be ready to play those roles. Aspects such as the tone and volume of the voice and the ability to listen and to provide positive or corrective feedback can make a significant difference in the success of collaborative work (Robbins et al., 2011).
Fortunately, collaboration skills can be taught using modeling, role playing with feedback, and gradual shaping of increasingly fine-tuned skills. There are specific protocols and strategies to teach these collaboration skills to learners so that they can apply them across a variety of settings and subject areas (see Johnson & Street, 2004).
When implementing collaboration in the classroom, it pays to prepare students for it explicitly. If students can listen, evaluate, and problem-solve effectively and confidently, then the whole group can focus on the content or skills being learned and truly benefit from the collaborative approach. Furthermore, once students learn good collaboration skills, they can apply them for life (in college, at home, at work), because these skills are not tied to a specific subject and are widely transferable to different settings.
Ferster, C. B., & M. C. Perrott (1968). Behavior principles. New York: Appleton Century Crofts.
Johnson, K. B., & E. M. Street (2004). Technology transfer: developing partnerships, training and coaching. In K. B. Johnson & E. M. Street, The Morningside model of generative instruction (pp. 166-187). Concord, MA: Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies.
Robbins, J. K., A. B. Weisemburg-Snyder, B. Damons, M. Van Rooyen, and C. Ismail (2011). Partnerships for Educational Excellence and Research: HPT in the townships of South Africa. Performance Improvement, 50, 31-39.