Discussions of collaborative learning and its benefits have become common currency on college campuses. Proponents argue that it promotes active learning, critical thinking, conceptual understanding, long-term retention of material, and high levels of student satisfaction. It also provides opportunities for students in large classes to interact on a smaller scale, and prepares students for the "real world." Clearly, collaborative learning is another useful teaching method that can help teachers and students accomplish specific goals. However, many teachers are unclear as to what precisely is meant by "collaborative learning." Collaborative activities range from small groups of students working together for part of a class period to formal semester-long group projects, with countless variations between these two extremes. But rather than attempt to sort out the nuances of various definitions, it is perhaps more valuable to analyze their shared attributes--attributes that may already exist in your own classroom. Underlying nearly all collaborative learning experiences is a distinctive set of assumptions about what teaching is, what learning is, and what the nature of knowledge is. Perhaps the most pivotal of these is the assumption that knowledge is created through interaction, not transferred from teacher to student. Hence, it typically--and logically--follows that instructional activity must build on students' current levels of background knowledge, experience, and understanding. It also follows that the teacher's role is to create a context in which learners can make the material their own through an active process of discovery. Effective collaborative activities promote individual learning through the group process.

Obviously, in order to meet the conditions of these assumptions, teachers must leave center stage and give up what Jane Tompkins has termed the "performance model" of teaching, wherein classroom activity focuses on showing the students how smart, knowledgeable, and well-prepared the teacher is. In collaborative classrooms, by contrast, what teachers do is by definition subordinate to what students do--interact, discuss, explore and think together. Which is not to say that collaborative teachers never lecture. They may. Nor does it mean they do not prepare. They do. But take a large enough sample of student behavior in collaborative classrooms, and it quickly becomes clear that a significant amount of class time is devoted to interaction and small group activities. Covering material becomes less important than facilitating student mastery and performance.

Many features of what is commonly identified as collaborative learning are also features of what is just plain good teaching. Thus, it is not wholly surprising that, although many faculty make deliberate efforts to include collaborative activities, their emergence is not always the result of conscious design and rarely occurs wholesale. More often, there is a gradual infusion of such activities that is frequently accomplished without fanfare and often is the serendipitous result of other kinds of experimentation. As Claudia A. Limbert (English) comments, "I'm always amazed to learn that collaborative teaching is a fairly new idea when for me it seems to be the only way to teach." And, in fact, collaboration already exists in many Penn State classrooms as open discussion, case study analysis, interdisciplinary and mini-research projects, interactive lectures, study contracts, and team model-building in a wide array of fields as divergent as English and engineering.

Collaboration in the classroom is infinitely adaptable and, consequently, something of a chameleon. It can involve groups of almost any size working on one project together or on several individual projects. It can even be informal study groups that meet periodically, enabling students to study together and learn from each other. Perhaps the most typical form of collaborative activity is formal problem-solving groups or teams, in which students work in groups to complete extended, and often applied, projects. These projects may be used to mimic the kinds of professional collaboration students will encounter as they enter the world of work. For example, Robert Melton (Aerospace Engineering) has upper-division students in his spaceship design course work in teams over two semesters to design space craft. Swamy Anantheswaran (Food Science) has senior-level students work in groups of four to solve real-world problems in food processing, drawing on sources in industry and at Penn State. When all goes well in these kinds of formal assignments, the result is much greater than what individual members of the group could have achieved on their own.

Collaboration can also involve more subtle variations of other teaching methods. One example is the modified lecture, which gets students actively involved in solving problems while still in class and also gives an opportunity to guide student problem solving. Even in very large class sections, faculty often interject a bit of collaborative learning by having students work on a single problem with one another and then discuss their solutions with the class as a whole. Similarly, following in-class demonstrations or experiments, it is often effective to ask students to break into groups to articulate or apply what they have just heard or seen. Or, after students have read about and analyzed a specific concept, you can ask them to explicate how changes in one set of variables affect other variables. For example, "In what ways, if any, would Piaget's theory of cognitive development have been different if he had studied children from non-Western cultures in addition to his own?" Even in fields where consensus is more common, these kinds of activities build confidence and shift focus away from algorithmic attempts to get the answer and onto strategies and heuristics that underlie effective problem solving.

Collaborative activities require a lot of preparation, largely because teachers can't control the agenda as they can in a lecture. Consequently, they must actually be more facile in dealing with material than if they were just telling students what they should know.

The success of a collaborative activity also depends on the appropriateness of the task that students are asked to perform. Thus, designing an assignment or question is crucial. Ideally, it should be a task for which the collaboration is an essential part of what is being taught. For example, when students work in groups to write research papers, the teaching method is not separate from the content. They are learning not just writing, but collaborative writing, which requires a distinct set of skills.

Similarly, in a geography class, you might teach the issues of water demands in the Southwest by dividing the class into groups and asking each group to take the position of a stakeholder in the Colorado River. The groups could then be charged with the mandate to argue for their group's own enlarged water rights at the expense of others. By neglecting to call on particular groups, such as the Mexicans of Baja, you can illustrate the vagaries and biases of the policy-making process. Thus, in addition to teaching students the procedural aspects of resource planning, this activity actually models the social process of negotiation and allows students to experience it for themselves.

Those teachers at Penn State who have used collaborative learning in their classes generally recommend the following advice for planning a collaborative activity:

Preparation also involves preparing students for what they are expected to do and letting them know what they can expect to get out of the activity. Generally speaking, you probably should not assume students know how to work effectively in groups. Most don't. One young professor, who had had measurable success teaching an upper-level course, attended a national conference on collaborative learning just as he was preparing to teach an introductory course for non-majors for the first time. Still full of inspiration from the conference and fueled by confidence from earlier successes, he entered the course and immediately asked students to work in groups to solve significant theoretical problems. Well over half of the class dropped in the first week, and those who remained grumbled loudly.

Put simply, this was a case of overestimating what students could do. The error was not in what he was trying to do, but in trying to do it too soon and too fast. As this professor discovered, students need to be prepared to perform the kind of work teachers expect from them, and that preparation involves providing guidance on how to work as a group as well as subject matter information. One common obstacle to collaboration is that students have learned in school that individual work is valued, so their idea of learning may include an underlying assumption of competition with other students. After years of acculturation, it can be difficult for students to let go of that competitive attitude and learn to think as members of a team.

Be ready to devote a certain amount of time to helping students overcome these obstacles and develop collaboration skills. For example, when using long-term groups, Robert Melton recommends that the assignments be designed so that they start simple and become progressively more difficult. In his class, the groups start with an interesting open-ended assignment that could be adapted to many different fields: groups of students are given some uncooked spaghetti, masking tape, and 30 minutes to build the tallest free-standing structure they can. This project, although not difficult, gives students the chance to see how others in their group think and work, how team members will interact, and what the group dynamics will be. In other words, to set the stage for collaboration, it is often easiest to begin by minimizing the significance of the initial problem or task. Make it just a bit silly, and students will find it more comfortable to work together rather than compete. The lesson learned is an important one: through collaboration, the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts.

In the following reading, Kathryn Plank reflects on how we measure the "success" of a collaborative activity. Her experience suggests that planning an effective collaborative activity requires a strong sense of the objectives the activity is supposed to help participants achieve.

Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching
The Pennsylvania State University