Victoria’s Department of Education describes collaborative (or cooperative) learning as students working together in small groups, with everyone taking part in a learning task. The Australian Curriculum names collaboration as part of a general capability: students “cooperate in groups and constructively contribute to ways of working and outputs”.
General informationThis guide describes what published curriculum and education department documents say about students learning together. It is general information, not advice about any one student or class. How a school teaches and reports this in its own classrooms is a question for that school.
Home groups and expert groups
The drawing at the top of each page comes from one example in the Department’s guide to its High Impact Teaching Strategies: a Year 10 History class using what the guide calls the Jigsaw Strategy. It ran in three moves.
- Home groups
The teacher put students into ‘home’ groups and gave each member of a group a different text.
- Expert groups
Students then regrouped with the classmates who had the same text, and researched and discussed it together until they were experts on one issue.
- Back to the home group
Finally, each student went back to their home group and shared what they now knew. Each one was responsible for learning their own part and for teaching it to the others.
The guide says the strategy let the teacher break a large task into smaller chunks and give different texts to different members of each home group, and that teaching each other turned students into content experts, building positive interdependence and mutual respect.
On this page, every table in the drawing is a home group, with one seat of each colour. On each guide the seats regroup by colour, as the expert groups did, and that guide’s own table is the one drawn at full strength.
Three places it turns up
In the curriculum
In version 9.0 of the Australian Curriculum, Collaboration is one of five sub-elements of Social management, an element of the Personal and Social capability. ACARA says that when students have well-developed social and emotional skills, a number of things come more easily to them: managing themselves, relating to others, collaborating, developing empathy, setting goals and resolving conflict.
As a teaching strategy
Collaborative learning is the fifth of Victoria’s 10 High Impact Teaching Strategies, which the Department describes as a bank of instructional practices internationally recognised as some of the most reliable for delivering learning outcomes. It also says the strategies do not provide a complete framework for professional practice.
In research on belonging
The Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) says that when children and young people feel a positive sense of belonging at school, the benefits are fundamental, and they flow on to their learning and engagement with school. Its guide for secondary schools lists giving students opportunities to work in pairs or groups among the strategies that have been shown to improve belonging.
The three guides
- Learning together in the Australian CurriculumWhere collaboration sits in the Personal and Social capability, and the other lines of its continuum that involve groups.
- What group work asks of studentsWhat students, and the tasks set for them, are expected to bring, as the Victorian Department of Education and AERO set it out, with two classroom examples.
- How collaboration is described and reportedThe Collaboration row of the curriculum continuum level by level, reflecting on feedback, and what a Victorian government school report must contain.