KQED News Mind/Shift – Staff Writer
“With listening and sharing learners try to construct joint understandings. Listening and sharing are the cornerstones of collaborative learning. We can learn more working together than working alone. A little history lesson: The study of cooperation arose after World War II as part of a research program on conflict resolution (Deutsch, 1977). Negotiation depends on cooperation, and negotiation is a preferable resolution to conflict than war. From this starting point, one reason to use cooperative learning is to help students develop better skills at cooperating (e.g., Johnson & Johnson, 1987). Subsequent research discovered a second reason to use cooperative learning: when students collaborate on class assignments, they learn the material better (we provide examples below). Ideally, small group work can yield both better abilities to cooperate and better learning of the content.”(more)