Collborative vs. Cooperative Learning

What is Collaborative Learning?
by Barbara Leigh Smith and Jean T. MacGregor

“Collaborative learning” is an umbrella term for a variety of educational approaches involving joint intellectual effort by students, or students and teachers together. Usually,students are working in groups of two or more, mutually searching for understanding,solutions, or meanings, or creating a product...

Collaborative learning represents a significant shift away from the typical teacher-centered or lecture-centered milieu in college classrooms. In collaborative classrooms,the lecturing/ listening/note-taking process may not disappear entirely, but it lives alongside other processes that are based in students’ discussion and active work with the course material.

Teachers who use collaborative learning approaches tend to think of themselves less as expert transmitters of knowledge to students, and more as expert designers of intellectual experiences for students-as coaches or mid-wives of a more emergent learning process.

Cooperative Learning
Cooperative learning represents the most carefully structured end of the collaborative learning continuum. Defined as “the instructional use of small groups so that students work together to maximize their own and each other’s learning” (Johnson et al. 1990),cooperative learning is based on the social interdependence theories of Kurt Lewin and Morton Deutsch... These theories and associated research explore the influence of the structure of social interdependence on individual interaction within a given situation which, in turn, affects the outcomes of that interaction (Johnson and Johnson, 1989)...In cooperative learning, the development of interpersonal skills is as important as the learning itself.

Read more about cooperative and collaborative learning at: http://learningcommons.evergreen.edu/pdf/collab.pdf

How can educators in the 21st century create collaborative and cooperative learning opportunities for their students?