What is collaborative learning?

Collaborative learning takes place when students work in small groups with everyone participating in a learning task. Within this framework, there are many approaches that use different kinds of tasks and organisation. At its core, collaborative learning relies on the creation of meaningful tasks and inviting group responses.

Key features of collaborative learning

Collaborative learning enriches the classroom for students. It begins with meaningful tasks that involve students participating in negotiating roles, responsibilities and outcomes. Collaborative learning is different from delegated group work. It actively encourages learning and focusing together, rather than delegating parts of a task.

Group selection is a vital consideration, one that you will need to vary depending on many factors:

• The purpose of the activity
• Individual learning goals
• Friendships and working relationships
• Facilitating that building of new relationships
• Delegation of particular skills and strengths

Group learning activities are specially designed so that student collaboration is essential to effectively accomplish the task, sharing roles, responsibilities and the ownership of outcomes.

Benefits of effective collaboration

Kids learn best in a social environment

Subject or topic information can be more effective when it comes from peers. Collaborative learning encourages this social aspect of education and enhances student understanding. The group nature of collaborative learning also promotes interactions. Students are organised in flexible groupings, either at random or by the teacher to reflect mixed academic ability or shared interests, for instance.

Educators can share workload and ideas

By collaborating on and building a shared playlist of videos, for example, educators share inspiration to develop high-quality resources for their classes.

Collaboration ideas for your class

Watching a video and completing interactives together are just one way your students can collaborate using ClickView’s interactive video feature.

6 Ways ClickView can help with cooperative and collaborative learning

1. Group discussion
   Students can watch a video together, sharing discussion and conversation. This activity is beneficial in the primary classroom.
2. Group videos
   Groups can create a video for an assignment by using the app to record. You can then mark or cross-mark, annotating the video and sharing feedback with all involved.
3. Lesson starters
   Existing video clips can be used as a framework when designing group collaboration or as a group lesson starter in your classroom.
4. Group tasks
   Teacher packs and lesson plans in ClickView have resources designed specifically for group engagement and collaborative learning.
5. Building playlists
   You can build playlists together for specific topics, subjects or units of work.
6. Giving feedback
   Your students can use ClickView to record self or peer feedback on a task, in the form of a vlog.

4 Teacher tips for collaborative learning

1. Creating a cooperative atmosphere
   It’s the responsibility of the educator to use particular strategies to create an atmosphere of collaboration and cooperation within the classroom or tutorial environment. These include strategic group selection and explicit teaching of cooperative learning skills, such as team-building exercises. Taking time to effectively set up the atmosphere results in more successful outcomes. Explore resources to help you with collaborative learning.
2. Types of collaborative activities
   Within the framework of collaborative learning, students are active participants at all stages of the process. Some examples of a group collaboration might be planning a class event for a school celebration day, such as a fete or fundraiser, or conducting a campus survey on waste and recycling. Starting with goal setting is a way of making sure each group member is working towards clear outcomes in a collaborative activity. Find inspiration in our video collection.
3. Collaboration between educators
   Take up the valuable opportunity to collaborate with other educators. By sharing ideas and inspiration, such as interactive videos and playlists, you can develop your own teaching practice and repertoire, while saving yourself time in the process. Work with educators on your own campus or connect online with those further afield and experience the benefits.
4. Cross-age collaboration
   Collaborative activities that bring students of different ages together are valuable learning experiences. Older and younger students alike have different perspectives and ideas to share and can learn from each other. Think of an opportunity in your school or higher education setting to explore cross-age collaboration. This could be a junior and senior secondary Science class coming together for an experiment or a multi-age exploration of Shakespeare for secondary English or Performing Arts. Explore more useful teaching strategies.

Use a range of teaching strategies to achieve optimum learning outcomes

A ClickView subscription gives you full access to 1000s of curriculum-aligned videos, including all supporting educational resources. Cooperative and collaborative learning are vital tools for your toolbox to boost student learning outcomes. To help you get the most out of ClickView, you also have access to our dedicated training channel, with videos on a selection of our most popular how-to topics. Watch these whenever you need on any device, from anywhere. We’re here to help you implement a range of effective teaching strategies in your classroom or lectures.