What are the advantages of Collaborative Learning?

Collaborative Learning is an educational approach that involves learners working together in order to solve a problem, complete a task, share ideas or even create a product. This approach is based on the idea that learning is a social practice, this is the knowledge that students acquire is the result from the interaction with their peers and teachers rather than an individual process.

Collaborative Learning allows students to:

• Be engaged in discussing ideas or a particular topic with peers.
• Learn how to work with other people and support their views.
• Develop a team spirit and effective communication skills.
• Deep their knowledge from different views and promote critical thinking.
• Be held accountable for their contributions to the group.

In the video below, Dylan Wiliam explains what the two basic conditions are for collaborative learning to work, which are setting group goals and individual accountability. This entails basically that students have to work as a group, not in a group in order to solve a problem or complete an activity, so each group of students must have shared goals. Wiliam affirms that if these two conditions are accomplished, collaborative learning has proved to show higher level of achievement and greater engagement  from the part of students. I strongly recommend to watch this video as it gives us a very clear overview on what collaborative learning is and also some advice for teachers to bear in mind when putting collaborative learning into practice.