Excellent Collaborative Learning Strategies for Modern Days
As thousands of students and learners move to online learning, educators find it challenging to adapt in-person classes for remote learning. Many instructors can do a much better job keeping students hooked while teaching online. Currently, they are stuffing courses with passive education activities, making online learning boring for students. However, the need of the hour is that educators employ different collaborative learning strategies to keep students engaged.
The slapdash Zoom lectures can keep students engaged for only a short time, making it easier for learners to get distracted, disengage and tune out.
Educators must get students to tune back by adopting diverse collaborative learning activities. This, in turn, will encourage learners to get involved with the learning process, material, and each other. Also, studies prove that online collaborative activities enhance academic performance, knowledge retention, and interpersonal skills.
Collaborative Learning Strategies for Student Engagement
We have compiled a list of our favorite collaborative learning strategies that can quickly improve the online learning process and keep students engaged throughout the course.
The jigsaw technique is one of the most effective methods to help students process and retain information. It builds on the method called “teaching others.” To use this from all the collaborative learning strategies, ask students to learn only a piece of material (jigsaw) and then teach it to fellow learners in a group. Therefore, the group will work together to synthesize the information and then prepare a presentation about what they learned.
It’s a classroom collaborative learning technique, but educators can enact it online hassle-free. In the think-pair-share approach, students are made to work together in pairs to assess, evaluate, analyze or synthesize a lesson. Then they have to share their findings with their fellow students.
You have to pair off students to reproduce the think-pair-share technique. First, the educator presents a question at the end of the class; students then meet and discuss their answers before the next session.
Only the loudest and most confident students get to participate and share ideas during class discussions. Whereas classroom brainstorming sessions help even the quieter students put forth their thoughts, questions, and concepts. Henceforth, brainwriting is an excellent collaborative learning strategy to encourage students to generate ideas beforehand while ensuring every student gets a chance for thoughtful discussion.
Daily Discussion Questions
Online discussion boards are among the simplest collaborative learning activities to facilitate student engagement and enhance learning. Post daily or weekly questions on discussion boards to spark conversation and motivate students to think critically and creatively.
Break-Out Group Discussions
It becomes difficult for some to speak up in large groups in classes with hundreds of students. So instead, segment your class into small breakout groups so that everyone gets a chance to speak.
Smaller breakout groups consisting of 20 people or less are very effective. Each discussion group should have a moderator to facilitate the discussion and manage conflicts and issues that may arise. A teaching assistant or a student volunteer can perform these duties.
Having pupils review each other’s work is an excellent way to ensure that students get the most out of individual feedback and attention, even when working in large groups. Teachers and students can use tools in online learning to get the most out of it.
The peer-review process benefits both the reviewer and the reviewee. Providing and receiving extensive feedback from fellow students help pupils deepen their understanding of the subject and improve their writing skills.
Scaffolding isn’t just unique to collaborative learning strategies, although it can be a valuable tool for structuring collaborative learning.
A house can’t be built without scaffolding; likewise, you cannot expect learners to do complex coursework without supporting study materials to direct them. Again, SimpliTaught comes in handy, providing supplementary lecture videos to help students learn seamlessly. Therefore, instructional scaffolding is a collaborative learning strategy that helps build more significant concepts on top of simpler ones.
The shift to online learning hasn’t been easy, but the above-mentioned collaborative learning strategies can help students feel involved and engaged even through their computer screens.
