Collaborative Learning

Active strategies for annotation like collaborative work and illustration increase students’ comprehension and retention.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The research is in: Learning is a social endeavor.

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