An entire book with ideas for collaborative student work
When we’re talking with instructors about collaborative learning, this is almost always the first resource we share. It’s replete with collaborative engagement ideas that align with different pedagogical purposes and contexts. We especially love how the examples are organized by an instructor's reason for using groups: techniques for reciprocal teaching, problem-solving, discussion, etc. Whether you’re looking for input on a collaborative practice you're already using or starting from scratch, this book is a great companion to your teaching.
CoLT Categories
To reduce the effort required to locate an appropriate CoLT, we have organized the techniques into six broad categories:
- Discussion - Student interaction and exchange is achieved primarily through spoken words.
- Reciprocal Peer Teaching - Students purposefully help each other master subject matter content and develop discipline-based skills.
- Problem Solving - Students focus on practicing problem-solving strategies.
- Graphic Information Organizers - Groups use visual tools to organize and display information. Writing Students write to learn important course content and skills.
- Games - Students work together in teams to participate in a competitive activity that is guided by a preexisting set of rules.
These categories represent our best attempt at sorting the techniques into sets that share fundamental commonalities, yet the dividing lines are not precise. For example, in the writing CoLTs we include CoLT 27: Peer Editing. This is a technique in which students critically review and provide editorial feedback on each other's essay, report, argument, research paper, or other writing assignment. One could make a case that this technique might be better included in reciprocal peer teaching, but we included it in the writing section because students write a response to another student's paper and thus learn to evaluate their own work.