“Collaborative Learning: Reframing the Classroom”

There have always been social dimensions to the learning process, but only in recent decades have specially designed collaborative learning experiences been regarded as an innovative alternative to the lecture-centered and teacher-as-single-authority approaches typical to most college classrooms. With increasing frequency, students are working with each other, and alongside their teachers, to grasp subject matter or deepen their understanding of it. In the process, they are developing their social skills as well as their intellectual ones. Students and their teachers are involved in a common enterprise, that of mutual seeking of understanding. Because many minds are grappling with the material at once while working toward a common goal, collaborative learning unleashes a unique intellectual and social synergy.