Collaborative Learning Strategies

Collaborative learning strategies are instructional approaches that build upon students’ active engagement with content while working with another person or a group of people. The approach is grounded in the notion that knowledge is not transferred from teacher to student; rather, knowledge is constructed through experiential interactions with content and with others—sometimes called socially constructed meaning. Intentional learning activities are designed to assist students in accommodating new information and meaning into existing knowledge structures or schema. The process is facilitated through active interactions between individuals or among small groups of people as individuals create meaning together. This entry discusses the elements of collaborative learning, implementing collaborative learning, and ways of dealing with inequities that can arise in students’ workload. The entry ends with a look ...