b. Designing Learning Tasks and Monitoring
While teachers plan general learning tasks, for example, to produce a product to illustrate a concept, historical sequence, personal experience, and so
on, students assume much more responsibility in a collaborative classroom for planning their own learning activities. Ideally, these plans derive in part from
goals students set for themselves. Thoughtful planning by the teacher ensures that students can work together to attain their own goals and capitalize on their
own abilities, knowledge, and strategies within the parameters set by the teacher. Students are more likely to engage in these tasks with more purpose
and interest than in traditional classrooms. Self-regulated learning is important in collaborative classrooms.
Students learn to take responsibility for monitoring, adjusting, self- questioning, and questioning each other. Such self-regulating activities are
critical for students to learn today, and they are much better learned within a group that shares responsibility for learning. Monitoring is checking one’s
progress toward goals. Adjusting refers to changes students make, based on monitoring, in what they are doing to reach their goals. Students can further
develop their self-regulating abilities when each group shares its ideas with other groups and gets feedback from them.
c. Assessment
While teachers have assumed the primary responsibility for assessing students’ performance in the past, collaborative classrooms view assessment
much more broadly. That is, a major goal is to guide students from the earliest school years to evaluate their own learning. Thus, a new responsibility is self-
assessment, a capability that is fostered as students assess group work.
7. The Advantages in Collaborative Learning
There are some advantages of collaborative learning, they are
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a. Celebration of diversity. Students learn to work with all types of people.
During small-group interactions, they find many opportunities to reflect upon and reply to the diverse responses fellow learners bring to the questions raised.
Small groups also allow students to add their perspectives to an issue based on
21Http:.virginia.eduPublicationsTeaching_ConcernsFall_1992TC_Fall_1992_Cooperative_Coll aborative.htm+students27+roles+in+collaborative+learningcd
their cultural differences. This exchange inevitably helps students to better understand other cultures and points of view.
b. Acknowledgment of individual differences. When questions are raised,
different students will have a variety of responses. Each of these can help the group create a product that reflects a wide range of perspectives and is thus
more complete and comprehensive. c.
Interpersonal development. Students learn to relate to their peers and other learners as they work together in group enterprises. This can be especially
helpful for students who have difficulty with social skills. They can benefit from structured interactions with others.
d. Actively involving students in learning. Each member has opportunities to
contribute in small groups. Students are apt to take more ownership of their material and to think critically about related issues when they work as a team.
e. More opportunities for personal feedback. Because there are more exchanges
among students in small groups, your students receive more personal feedback about their ideas and responses. This feedback is often not possible in large-
group instruction, in which one or two students exchange ideas and the rest of the class listens.
Adi W. Gunawan in his book “Genius Learning Strategy” points out the advantages of collaborative learning, are:
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• Training a sense of care and attention. • Training emotional intelligent.
• Sharpening interpersonal intelligent • Training the team work ability.
• Conflict management • Depth understanding to what students have learned
• Improvement of motivation and learning circumstances.
Carolyn Kessler also summarizes the benefits of collaborative learning as stated below:
• Collaborative learning provides the richness of alternatives to structure interactions between students.
• Collaborative learning addresses content area learning and language
22 Adi W. Gunawan, Genius Learning Strategy, Jakarta: PT. Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2004 p. 203
development needs within the same organizational framework. • The variety of ways to structure student practice with lesson material increases
opportunities for individualized instruction, such as peer-provided clarifications.
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A study conducted by Thorndike et al. showed that two or more students can solve problems of various kinds better when they work in groups than
when they work individually.
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With the explanation above, we can conclude that students apply higher thinking strategies which help them construct meaning from
what they read and help them monitor progress toward their goals.
8. The Disadvantages in Collaborative Learning
