Engage Students Through Collaborative Conversations 

What are collaborative conversations? 

Student collaboration is a learning approach in which two or more students actively engage with one another to achieve shared academic goals through discussion, problem-solving, and joint effort. It involves interactive participation, where students contribute ideas, ask questions, and build meaning together in an environment of mutual respect and shared responsibility.

Key Characteristics:

• Active Engagement: Students are mentally and socially involved, showing focus, curiosity, and persistence.
  
  

• Shared Goals: Learning tasks are designed so students work toward a common academic purpose.
  
  

• Dialogue and Interaction: Collaboration centers on conversation—listening, responding, and refining ideas.
  
  

• Mutual Accountability: Students take ownership of both their own learning and their group’s success.
  
  

• Peer Support: Learners help each other clarify understanding, reflect on feedback, and develop deeper thinking.

By fostering active engagement, collaboration increases motivation, promotes deeper learning, and encourages students to become more invested in the learning process.

Why are collaborative conversations important? 

According to Pellegrino (How People Learn, cite correctly), learning is fundamentally interpersonal, often occurring in and through social interactions. When learners collaborate, they make their thinking visible to one another, thereby sharing perspectives and strategies that may challenge and extend each other’s thinking and understanding. 

John Hattie's research on the effect sizes of various influences on student achievement includes collaborative learning strategies. In his synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses (notably published in Visible Learning, 2009 and updated in later editions), Hattie identifies the effect size of student collaboration (or cooperative learning) as follows:

• Cooperative Learning: d = 0.59 An effect size of 0.59 is considered above average and educationally significant, since Hattie's "hinge point" for meaningful impact is 0.40—anything above this is regarded as having a positive, worthwhile effect on student learning.

Additional Related Effect Sizes from Hattie:

• Peer tutoring: d = 0.51
  
  

• Reciprocal teaching: d = 0.74
  
  

• Small group learning: d = 0.49
  
  

These results suggest that structured, purposeful student collaboration can significantly enhance learning outcomes, particularly when paired with strategies like goal setting, feedback, and teacher guidance.

Collaborative conversations engage students for several key reasons, aligning with cognitive, social, and emotional aspects of learning:

• Active Participation Enhances Understanding

• Social Interaction Boosts Motivation

• Exposure to Diverse Perspectives

• Language Development

• Immediate Feedback and Clarification

• Ownership of Learning

How to use Collaborative Conversations? 

1. Develop, discuss, and practice any class transitions to set up and arrange for student groupings and optimal setting to foster collaborative conversations.

2. Provide, discuss, and practice Academic Sentence Stems with students.  Discuss sentence stems to use to describe agreement, disagreement, extending ideas, etc.

3. Develop Collaborative Group Norms and Roles, identifying expectations for participation in the Collaborative Conversation activity, as well as describing individual responsibilities during the activity.

4. Provide and use a rubric to outline performance and participation expectations, and for providing feedback to students during and after the collaborative process.

5. Offer opportunity for reflection through discussion and writing.  Consider utilizing a graphic organizer to support reflective process.