Collaborative Learning

This simple activity helps students practice giving and receiving peer feedback—and gets them out of their desks.

Quick activities that can be used to check for understanding or emphasize key information at the end of a lesson.

Giving students randomly assigned roles in their group work helps ensure that they all participate.

Vertical learning—a framework for high quality group work—showcases student thinking for everyone to see.

Sentence starters that students use to join a class discussion encourage both academic thinking and social connectedness.

When we think of student engagement in learning activities, it is often convenient to understand engagement with an activity as being represented by good behavior (i.e. behavioral engagement), positive feelings (i.e. emotional engagement), and, above all, student thinking (i.e. cognitive engagement) (Fredricks, 2014). This is because students may be behaviorally and/or emotionally invested in a given activity without actually exerting the necessary mental effort to understand and master the knowledge, craft, or skill that the activity promotes.

Simple strategies you can use to have kids teach each other—a research-proven path to better learning.

Breaking up rows of desks fosters collaboration and empowers kids to think about how they work best.

Brief daily meetings give students working in groups the structure to hold each other accountable on long-term projects.

Teachers encourage student-centered learning by allowing students to share in decisions, believing in their capacity to lead, and remembering how it feels to learn.

In a series of interviews, researcher Patricia Kuhl reveals the science behind the social brain—which she calls the gateway to human cognition.