Thus, it is not wholly surprising that, although many faculty make deliberate efforts to include collaborative activities, their emergence is not always the result of conscious design and rarely occurs wholesale. More often, there is a gradual infusion of such activities that is frequently accomplished without fanfare and often is the serendipitous result of other kinds of experimentation. Inside, we describe some of the kinds of collaborative learning we have already discovered at Penn State and invite you to contribute your own. Perhaps the most typical form of collaborative activity is the use of formal problem-solving groups or teams , in which faculty assign students in groups to complete extended, and often applied, projects. When all goes well, the result is generally greater than what individual members of the group could have achieved on their own.
Collaboration can also involve more subtle variations of other teaching methods.
One example is the modified lecture , which gets students actively involved in solving problems while still in class and also gives an opportunity to guide student problem solving. Even in very large class sections, faculty often effectively interject a bit of collaborative learning by having students work on a single problem with one another and then discuss their solutions with the class as a whole. Similarly, following in-class demonstrations or experiments, it is often effective to ask students to break into groups to articulate or apply what they have just heard or seen. Or, after reading about and analyzing a specific concept, you can ask them to explicate how changes in one set of variables affects other variables. Effective collaborative activities require a lot of preparation, largely because teachers can't control the agenda as they can in a lecture.