George Lucas Educational Foundation
Edutopia

Collaborative Learning

Working together to solve problems and complete projects deepens students' learning and builds collaborative skills. Learn how to design activities to help develop these skills.

  • Collaborative Learning

    Group Work That Works

    Educators weigh in on solutions to the common pitfalls of group work.
  • Communication Skills

    Encouraging Academic Conversations With Talk Moves

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

    60 Second-Strategy: Cooperative Learning Roles

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

    Designing a Public School From Scratch

    On a mission to reimagine traditional schooling, a K–8 school in San Diego puts teachers and students at the center.
  • Collaborative Learning

    Learning on Their Feet

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

    22 Powerful Closure Activities

    Quick activities from DJ summaries to paper snowball fights can be used to check for understanding or emphasize key information at the end of a lesson.
  • The Research Is In

    3 Ways to Maximize Peer-to-Peer Learning

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

    Staying On Task During Project-Based Learning

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

    A ‘University’ Model for High School

    In small-town Wisconsin, four schools cluster on one campus, fostering a culture of experimentation and self-directed learning for both students and teachers.
  • Brain-Based Learning

    Learning and the Social Brain

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

    The Social Classroom

    Increasingly, modern classrooms support group work and peer-to-peer collaboration. The science says that’s right on.
  • Student Engagement

    Golden Rules for Engaging Students in Learning Activities

    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.
  • Brain-Based Learning

    What Is the Social Brain?

    The research is in: Learning is a social endeavor.
  • Project-Based Learning

    A Research-Backed Science Curriculum

    Learning collaboratively through projects yields results for middle school students.
  • Learning Environments

    Flexible Seating Elevates Student Engagement

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