Collaborative Learning in the Classroom: A Guide to Evaluation

Over last decade collaborative learning has become an important method for college English teachers, who now realize that their own education rarely taught them how colleagues work together learn and make meaning in discipline, and who have rejected philosophically kinds of approaches teaching that isolate learners instead of drawing them together. In addition, problems for education in seventies and eighties-the changes in student populations, growth in number of nontraditional learners in collegiate body, alienating nature of learning in large classrooms with too many students, acknowledged decline of freshmen entry-level skills in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking-these and other challenges an earlier educational paradigm have shaken our faith in conventional teaching strategies and have called question our obsession with major metaphor for learning over last three hundred years, the human mind as Mirror of Nature. As Ken Bruffee has put it, this old metaphor insists that teachers give students as much information as they can to insure that their mental mirrors reflect reality as completely as possible and also insists that we help our students through exercise of intellect or development of sensibility, sharpen and sensitize their inner eyesight (Liberal Education 98). In this ground-breaking essay, Bruffee, drawing upon works of Thomas Kuhn, L. S. Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, M. L. J. Abercrombie, and Richard Rorty, advances an alternate concept of knowledge as socially justified belief. According this concept, knowledge depends on social relations, not on reflections of reality. Knowledge is a collaborative artifact (103) that results from intellectual negotiations (107). Bruffee explores curricular implications of knowledge collaboratively generated, always with one eye on classroom and other on philosophical underpinnings of new paradigm. But Bruffee's model, built on delicate and necessary tension between theory and practice, may not, I suspect, have guided much of what teachers are calling collaborative learning today. I mention this suspicion out of my recent investigations into issue of assessment generally as force in postsecondary