Examples Of Collaborative Learning

What is collaborative learning?

Collaborative learning is an informative way to deal with teaching and learning that involves groups of students working together to tackle an issue, finish a task, or make a product. According to Gerlach (as cited in McLaren, 2014), collaborative learning is “based on the idea that learning is a naturally social act in which the participants talk among themselves.” When collaborative learning strategies are utilized to support instruction, students have a tendency to be more engaged, retain information better and have better learning results over those of individual learners (McLaren, 2014).

Collaborative learning situation is an important move away from the typical teacher centered or lecture- centered process

Teachers face new challenges to provide different learning environments for students with motivated learning practices. It also creates for students’ new responsibilities and opportunities, and from all these difficulties develops changed and improved interactions with the learning materials, for both teacher and students.

Examples of collaborative learning method

Collaborative learning activities can help students to create critical thinking and gather work skills. There are numerous sorts of collaborative activities that students can complete. However, teachers should be set up to make them talk and move in the classroom for these activities.

Jigsaw Activity

One simple activity that can be carried out is the jigsaw activity. Some conditions that can be used in the jigsaw strategy

Learning is lively, productive process: In collaborative learning situations, students are not just taking new thoughts or information. They are producing something new with the information and ideas. To learn new information, skills or ideas, students have to work lively in purposeful ways. They need to integrate what they already know to recognize what they thought they knew.

Learning depends on rich contexts: Collaborative learning activities usually start with problems, for which students must give out relevant facts and ideas. Rather than being detached observers of questions and answers, students must become instant experts with rich knowledge. It is a fact that high contexts challenge students to prepare and improve higher intellectual and problem-solving skills.

Learners are diverse: As every student is bound to be different from one and other, they tend to bring out their ideas and speak out their minds to the classroom. As a result, we can identify the areas they are weak in and they have rich knowledge in. Moreover, when students interact with each other we learn their abilities of skills. The diverse perspectives are just not beneficial for us teachers, but as a matter of fact is it advantageous for the