Collaborative learning is the act of distributing the responsibility of learning to the students. Despite that this instructional method has been widely researched and advocated throughout the professional and serious academic literature, the form of teaching is also enriching the genre of the old light bulb joke:
Q: How many collaborative learning teachers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: It’s really not important that the light bulb gets changed, or that the correct way to change the light bulb is communicated. What’s important is that everyone participates in the process of discovering the light bulb.
Is this a truthful representation of collaborative learning? Let’s go back to the initial concept: collaborative learning is an educational approach to teaching and learning that involves groups of learners working together to solve a problem, complete a task, or create a product.