Victoria’s Department of Education says collaborative learning relies on students actively taking part in negotiating roles, responsibilities and outcomes, and that group activities are designed so that students have to collaborate to complete the task. Its guide names three things students do when the strategy is working: they understand the protocols for working together, accept their own responsibility for taking part and contributing, and give each other feedback skilfully.
General informationThis page draws mostly on the Victorian Department of Education’s High Impact Teaching Strategies, with the Australian Education Research Organisation’s (AERO’s) practice guides on belonging. It describes classroom practice in general, not any one student, class or school.
What counts as collaborative learning
The Department’s definition is broad. Collaborative (or cooperative) learning means students working together in small groups on a learning task, with every one of them taking part, and there is a range of approaches, each organised differently and built around different kinds of tasks. It can stretch to the whole class: the guide’s examples are an environmental project in the school and a community survey.
Two things support it, the Department says: designing meaningful tasks, and inviting group responses to questions. To set up an atmosphere of cooperation, the teacher uses strategies such as cooperative learning strategies and choosing groups with care.
Three things asked of students
The Department’s guide says the strategy is demonstrated when students:
- “understand the protocols for working collaboratively”The matching line for teachers is regularly setting group tasks and establishing ground rules about how groups operate. The guide also says students are explicitly taught team-building skills, so they learn to work with others, negotiate and contribute to shared assignments.
- “accept individual responsibility for participating and contributing to group tasks”Teachers support this by giving each member of a group a different role, so each student is responsible for a particular part of the task. Group members share roles, responsibilities and ownership of the outcome.
- “are skilled at providing feedback to each other”The Department’s strategy on feedback says peers as well as teachers can give it, formally or informally, spoken or written, and that whatever form it takes it includes specific advice a student can use to improve.
What the task and the groups have to do
Much of the guide is about how the task and the groups are built. It sets the two sides out plainly.
The strategy is demonstrated when the teacher
- designs tasks that need students to share expertise, and makes sure each student’s contribution is valued by the others
- gives groups different content according to students’ readiness
- organises flexible groups whose membership changes, based for example on friendship, mixed academic ability or common interests
Summarised from the Department’s list.
It is not demonstrated when the teacher
- dominates class discussion
- lets a few students dominate discussion
- gives students few chances to interact with, and support, each other
Summarised from the Department’s list.
On choosing groups, the Department calls group selection and composition an important consideration, and says membership should vary with the activity’s purpose and students’ individual learning goals.
Guided teaching underneath
AERO’s guide for secondary schools says group work should be underpinned by a strong foundation of guided instruction.
One of the Department’s examples shows what that can look like. A Year 10 History teacher had tried group work before, but students resisted it and the groups did not work well. This time she used the explicit teaching model: she taught the class directly how to work as a team, on an activity built so that every student had to contribute and share expertise to reach the learning goals.
An example from the Department’s guide: a Year 5/6 classTeachers at a primary school in Melbourne’s outer east wanted to develop collaborative learning in their Year 5/6 classes and, after consulting their students, took on a project to design and build solar-powered boats. They set clear goals and success criteria, one of which was working collaboratively in groups, and explicitly taught skills such as negotiating and contributing jointly to the assignment. Mentors from the school community, including engineers and electricians, shared their expertise.
By the end, every student had helped design and build their team’s boat, each group having negotiated its roles, responsibilities and outcomes, and students said they had learned to value the contributions of every group member.
What the evidence says
The Department’s guide cites Hattie (2009) finding an effect size of 0.59 for cooperative learning compared with individual work, and a 2013 meta-study finding 0.54, and notes that the Australian Teaching and Learning Toolkit cites an average effect size of 0.41. The guide’s summary table also lists collaborative learning at +5 months of progress, as reported in Evidence for Learning’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit (2017). It adds that effect sizes for collaborative learning vary with the learning area, students’ ages and their cultural backgrounds, and that some analyses find a much stronger effect on achievement for adolescents than for younger children.
AERO comes at it through belonging. Its secondary guide says peer support meets students’ needs for relatedness and acceptance, and that it can come from trust and closeness with peers, academic support (such as clarifying teacher directions or comparing schoolwork), acceptance and social support. Teachers can support peer relationships by building time for peer support into their lessons. AERO’s primary guide reports that students with positive peer relationships at school are “up to 2 months ahead in their NAPLAN scores 2 years later” than students without them.
Peer mentoring
Not all learning together happens inside one class. AERO’s secondary guide says peer mentoring has been shown to promote connectedness at school, with students acting as role models, sharing knowledge, skills and expertise, and offering personal support. Mentoring can include shared activities, guidance, information or encouragement. Its primary guide adds that peer mentoring can improve cohesion, get students mixing with different groups across the school, and build their skills for social interaction.
Both guides set the same conditions for it to work best: mentoring should be high dosage (meeting at least once a week), long-term (lasting at least a year) and include a mix of social and academic activities.