Design And Evaluation Of A Collaborative Learning Environment

|With group learning, peer assessment can also be utilised which can be a valuable tool. Some learners will respond better to feedback |

“Alright,” the teacher says to the students, “I’m going to number all of you off into groups. Each group will read a section from the textbook and become experts on that section. Then, each group will teach the rest of the class what they learned from their reading.” This is an instruction common to the classrooms in the United States. More and more is the pedagogy of public education leaning in favor of team-based activities, projects, and learning. Group work is generally seen as an ultimately beneficial way to teach students, but this may be somewhat of a fallacy. The emphasis on group-based learning in public schools causes a multitude of problems.

Collaboration: In a community of learners, students work together in teams, partners, or groups. This allows students to gain social skills and increases students’ motivation for the project. Students share ideas and gain a new understanding of the content.

All groups would meet three times a week, so we would meet every other day to work on the required skills. I broke my level one students up into two different groups. Group 1 consists of student 1, student 6, student 15, student 20, and student 23 while group 2 consists of student 9, student 17, student 22, and student 25. All of group 1 students scored a ninety percentile or higher in reading comprehension (RC) so I put these students together so I can provide them with more challenging strategies and higher-level skilled work in order to help them continue to grow academically. Some of the strategies I would use with these students during small group instruction would be using context clues to, learning new affixes, and root words to help students read and understand unfamiliar words. I would also work with these students on different grade appropriate text structures, text features, summarizing, and main idea to build reading comprehension skills. While my group 2 students are still overall, high leveled students they scored below the ninetieth percentile but above the eighty-fourth percentile. These students would also receive many of the same instructional strategies that would challenge them, but also help build upon their existing skills in reading comprehension, vocabulary, and reasoning

The teacher prepares the students to operate in a small group together. This practice can enhance the student’s cooperative learning skills.

When teachers have the opportunity to work with students in smaller groups they can provide extended intensive lessons in addition to whole group instruction. The study showed that when children receive information in whole group instruction and then the information is reinforced in small group instruction they build a stronger vocabulary, and they are able to retell more facts. Overall, this study creates awareness of the benefits of small group instruction.

A reflective essay on the skills acquired from collaborative learning and how they may be applied in practice.

Interestingly, other studies support the perceived barrier of the lack of face-to-face interaction noted above in social theory of learning. Daniel, Schwier, and McCalla (2003), noted that the concept of community as a learning organism provides the framework for investigating learning concepts as it relates to individuals and groups and serves as the basis in analyzing and understanding learning as a social process (Masika, R. & Jones, J., 2015). Tinto (2003) goes on to support this by concluding that students learn better together and build support groups that go beyond the classroom when they

2. Cooperative learning directed towards focusing on students’ team work while doing their project assignments.

TBL is a structured form of small-group learning that emphasizes student preparation out of class and application of knowledge in class. Students are organized strategically into diverse teams of 5-7 students that work together throughout the class. Before each unit or module of the course, students prepare by reading prior to class. Therefore, in comparison to groups involved in informal small-group work and collaborative learning, a team is characterized by a high level of individual commitment to the welfare of the team in addition to a high level of trust among team members. In order to develop an effective learning team, members spend time in databases and the worldwide web, and interact both synchronously in a chat discussion

Collaborative learning stems from the theory of Vygotsky’s conception of Zone of proximal development. The thought is that children learn best with “help and guidance” (Ormrod, 2012). In transitioning this zone to a collaborative learning experience, children work with their peers in broadening their learning experience, allowing small groups of students to work together to share knowledge, exchange ideas, problem solve, and more. These classroom environments help to create durable abilities in students and aid in producing a “smoother integration into adult society when the activities resemble real-world tasks” (Ormrod, 2012). As students work with peers and adults, they adopt some of the learning strategies demonstrated and develop more skills in problem solving. This scaffolding creates a trickle-down effect of knowledge construction. In collaborative learning, students are afforded a myriad of enriching opportunities to explore perspectives that may differ from their own. These activities serve to create a self-awareness in the student of their responsibilities to a group, requiring them to self-monitor their activity (Lee, Tsai, Chai, & Koh, 2014).

The overall functioning of a classroom is impacted by trust, safety, and consistency. When a student does not feel safe he or she will reflect this through his or her behavior. Trust is important for students to take risks and allow learning to occur in the classroom. Trust, safety, and consistency are beneficial in the learning environment. A classroom where students feel safe, realize the teacher is consistent, and trust is developed, will allow students to grow and change socially, emotionally, and academically. This will offer a positive learning environment.

Once students are grouped, they generally stay at that level for their school careers, and the gap between achievement and levels becomes exaggerated over time. The notion that students' achievement levels at any given time will predict their achievement in the future becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (Slavin, 1990). Wheelock doesn't dismiss all forms of ability grouping. For example, a group might be set up within a class to help students who are having difficulty with a specific skill, or a group might be formed to "pre-teach" a skill to a group of students who might have difficulty grasping a concept.

“Through collaboration, ideas can be shared, new and better strategies can be developed, problems can be solved, students’ progresses can be better monitored, and their outcomes are evaluated effectively.”¬ (Lee, 1996).

Collaborative learning is founded on the idea that the learning process is a naturally social act which requires the participants to talk among themselves. Collaborative learning involves small groups of students who act on a structured learning activity to solve a problem, complete a task, or create a product. In simpler terms, the students work in groups to learn or understand a new concept they are studying. In this learning approach, it is important to understand that the students are accountable for individual work as well as the group work they do as a group in collaborative learning