When planning a TEPBLL is important to have a lot of organization and an alternative
plan for contingencies because collaborative learning projects require many strategic
planning. Therefore, deciding what kind of interaction you want your students to have it's an essential step in the process. Here's a word cloud of two types of interaction: Collaborative Learning and Group Work. They sound very similar, and sometimes they are referred as synonyms, but actually they're not. I made them with a program called TAGUL, an easy, fast and useful webpage for creating word clouds. You can use them to create infographic-like visualisations to enhance students learning.
Once you've seen the both words clouds I
made with the main concepts of each one, I think it's clear which one I want to
use as a future teacher: Collaborative Learning. However, the key difference remains in
the fact that collaborative learning requires positive interdependence with
structured goals, accountability for individual work within the group, sharing
of leadership roles, explicit teaching of collaborative skills and teacher
observation of students interaction whereas group work, has no
positive interdependence between group members and no structured goals, no
accountability for an individual's share of a groups work, no explicit
assignment of leadership roles, the assumption that students already have the
skills required to collaborate and little to no teacher observation.
Therefore, it's essential to promote collaborative learning, especially in the context of TEPBLL, in order for student's to truly co-construct knowledge.
I would like to end up this section with a quote I really like about collaboration:
