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.

  • How-To: The Jigsaw Method, Revisited

    An excellent video on an older, cooperative learning strategy that researchers say remains highly effective.
    Stephen Merrill

  • More Than Highlighting: Creative Annotations

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

  • Group Work That Works

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

  • 60-Second Strategy: Cooperative Learning Roles

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

  • 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.
    Todd Finley

  • 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.
    Nora Fleming

  • Learning on Their Feet

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

  • Encouraging Academic Conversations With Talk Moves

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

  • 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.
    Nicolás Pino-James, PhD

  • 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.

  • 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 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.

  • The Social Classroom

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

  • 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.
    Nora Fleming

  • Flexible Seating Elevates Student Engagement

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