COLLABORATIVE & COOPERATIVE LEARNING

Cooperative Learning

It is an useful teaching approach that consists in organizing group activities where students not only construct their own learning but also help their classmates to do the same.  This is accomplish by interacting and sharing what every one knows by  asking one another for information, evaluating one another’s ideas, monitoring one another’s work  in order to improve  everyone knowledge. In this kind of learning teachers become learners as well, even though they still control the process.   

Ross and Smyth (1995) describe successful cooperative learning tasks as intellectually demanding, creative, open-ended, and involve higher order thinking tasks.

Collaborative Learning

More than a teaching approach it is a personal philosophy in which students basically , by working in small groups, accomplish a specific goal. In this learning, the activities through which students develop new knowledge are a little bit freer since this is based on their own abilities and experiences. This learning applies  in the classroom, at committee meetings, with community groups, within their families and generally as a way of living with and dealing with other people.

"Collaborative learning is based on the idea that learning is a naturally social act in which the participants talk among themselves (Gerlach, 1994). It is through the talk that learning occurs."

Collaboration is a philosophy of interaction and personal lifestyle whereas cooperation is a structure of interaction designed to facilitate the accomplishment of an end product or goal.