Why Do Peers Need to Work in Groups to Learn? Unlocking Collaborative Learning

It wasn’t until I had been teaching 11- to 18-year-olds for four years that I realized I had been consistently misled. Up until that point I had trusted my teacher training to provide the best of what had been discovered in the discipline of teaching and learning. If I had been shown a method or theory by which I could perform my job more efficiently, I assumed it would have been forged in the crucible of experience and evidence. I assumed that what we knew about teaching, say, chemistry, for example, progressed in a linear, accumulative way. But I found the opposite.

As a philosophy and religious studies high school teacher in the United Kingdom, I discovered that a good deal of what was considered orthodoxy in my profession was unsubstantiated. I believe many of my teacher colleagues in the United States have made similar discoveries.

In 2004, I had just emerged from the U.K. Department for Education’s Fast Track recruitment program into teaching, where I had spent weekends learning about Neuro-Linguistic Programming, a program called Brain Gym, and how to sort my students according to their learning styles.¹ I was told that my students possessed multiple intelligences, and it was strongly hinted to me that the more technology I could accommodate into my lessons, the better their needs as digital natives would be met. My initial classroom design of rows and columns was frowned upon, and tables and horseshoes were recommended. And all because, I was told, the research confirmed each avenue.

Except that it didn’t. Often, it barely addressed the topics. I won a teacher fellowship at Cambridge University, where I was given the opportunity to pull back the curtain of the mighty Oz of research. It was an epiphany. As I learned to navigate the university’s endless libraries of education journals and papers, I was struck by a thought that at first I dismissed as impertinence: a good deal of research I had been recommended as a new teacher was astonishingly misguided.² I felt like a heretic. The temerity of my emergent conclusion struck me as astonishing, rightly. But my master’s degree in philosophy (with a focus on epistemology) kept pointing me back the same way: a lot of what was considered research was often based on little more than bias or opinion.

For instance, Neuro-Linguistic Programming was a ragbag of fashionable pseudoscience that had been broadly criticized, even at the time of its publication, but still it lurched on for decades. It was mystical hoo-ha that rested on the “science of success” that predicted among other things that you could tell when someone was lying. Learning styles had similarly been dead on a mortuary slab for many years, but even today teachers are earnestly instructed in their use. Brain Gym was, until recently, considered to be cutting-edge practice, including the claim, widely believed by Brain Gym enthusiasts, that water should be held to the roof of the mouth because it reaches the brain quicker that way. And so on. Everywhere you looked, education was, and is, deviled by what physicist Richard Feynman would call cargo cult science, aping the form of science in every way but the ones that mattered.

It inspired me to write Teacher Proof: Why Research in Education Doesn’t Always Mean What It Claims, and What You Can Do about It, on which this article is based. My book bluntly exposes some of the bigger education myths that still rattle their chains in the classroom. Each chapter is devoted to a questionable educational theory; I examine each claim made for its efficacy by simply following the research crumbs backward.

Often, I found that a claim would refer to this or that seminal paper, which I would then find rested its evidence base on some other seminal paper, which I would then pursue and so on. Maddeningly, I often found the most basic of problems: papers that referred to works by the same author, papers that relied on the most minuscule of sample sizes, papers that failed to in any way test their own hypothesis to failure, and so on. I found enormous over-reliance on opinion and testimonials as proof of any kind.

In short, I found what you might find in any science, but it seemed to be magnified in educational science. Why? One reason was that social science practitioners frequently proposed that what might be classed as proof in their field did not have to meet the rigors of the physical sciences, which is understandable given the challenge of dealing with human beings, who are not inert objects of examination but rather can be difficult and interactive participants in their own analysis. But instead of acknowledging this profound obstacle, many researchers simply ignore it.

There is a great deal of excellent research in education, but it is often drowned out by the cacophony of the fashionable, the novel, the exciting.

In 2012, to help remedy this disastrous state of affairs, I founded researchED (www.workingoutwhatworks.com), a teacher-led, grass-roots wiki movement aimed at empowering teachers through greater research literacy and bringing together the best research for the classrooms that need it most. Since our first conference, it’s taken off, and now we’re preparing for a researchED conference in New York in May 2015. Clearly, there’s an appetite among many teachers to no longer be beholden to the institutions responsible for their support, and instead to find out—through a process of profound reprofessionalization—what actually works.

One of the most enduring myths I’ve encountered in education is the subject of this article: group work. I’ve seen entire educational districts seized by the belief that group work is the only way for students to learn, or at least by far the most efficient way. I spent years wrestling with the tension between the claims supporting this teaching method and the evidence of my own classrooms. And when I investigated the foundations on which these claims were made, I found that they were often not substantiated in any credible way.

Group work does have its place in the classroom. Allowing students to partner on a particular assignment can engage them in the subject matter they are studying, help them improve their skills, and teach them the value of teamwork—as long as the students, themselves, do one crucial thing: stay on task.

When students bring the necessary focus to group work, and when teachers use it appropriately—that is, to supplement instruction, not replace it—group work can go a long way in reinforcing content knowledge. But it should not take the place of fully guided instruction, which sound research (not the kind I discuss above) has overwhelmingly found is most effective in helping students learn.³ Still, in recent years, group work has become one of many fads to seemingly conquer the education world. Why is this so?

The Genesis of Collaborative Learning: Tracing the Roots

In the early 2000s, a surge of research appeared to champion group work as a superior learning methodology.¹ Proponents asserted its potential to:

• Enhance learning outcomes
• Cultivate social competencies
• Foster empathy and altruism
• Deepen understanding
• Improve test performance and knowledge retention
• Develop sophisticated learning strategies
• Nurture independent learning capabilities
• Promote lifelong learning habits

Concurrently, numerous reports highlighted the prevalent misuse of group work, where students were physically grouped but lacked meaningful collaborative learning experiences. These and subsequent reports echoed a common theme: for effective learning, students should be in group settings. The prevailing narrative suggested that group work was inherently effective, and any shortcomings were attributed to improper implementation.

Early in my career, this notion of group work as an infallible learning driver was deeply ingrained in my pedagogical training. During one of my initial teaching evaluations, a lesson I taught, while not flawless, received an unsatisfactory rating. The rationale? The absence of group work, which was deemed essential for deep learning. The evaluation criteria seemed predetermined by process over student outcomes, akin to judging an Olympic sprinter solely on their adherence to a specific running style, regardless of their race time.

For a novice teacher lacking the confidence to challenge established norms, such criticism is disheartening. It impacted my confidence for months, as professional critiques often do. My lesson wasn’t just considered average; it was deemed substandard, a failure to my students.

The modern iteration of group work finds its origins in the theories of influential thinkers like Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget. Vygotsky, a prominent early 20th-century Russian psychologist, has exerted considerable influence, particularly in recent decades. His central tenet was that social interaction precedes individual development, positing action as the foundation of thought formation. Vygotsky’s child-centered learning paradigm casts students as active problem solvers, with teachers transitioning from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side.” Language, in his view, is a cognitive tool, with classroom discourse and group activities serving to narrow a student’s “zone of proximal development”—the disparity between their current capabilities and potential. Vygotsky articulated, “What a child can do today in cooperation, tomorrow he will be able to do on his own…. The students are responsible for one another’s learning as well as their own. Thus, the success of one student helps other students to be successful.”²

Advocates of collaborative learning underscore that the dynamic exchange of ideas within small groups not only boosts student engagement but also sharpens critical thinking abilities. Anuradha Gokhale’s 1995 article asserts, “There is persuasive evidence that cooperative teams achieve at higher levels of thought and retain information longer than students who work quietly as individuals. The shared learning gives students an opportunity to engage in discussion, take responsibility for their own learning, and thus become critical thinkers.”³

Vygotsky posited that students achieve greater intellectual heights in collaborative scenarios compared to individual work.⁴ Diverse groups, encompassing varied knowledge and experiences, enrich the learning process. Psychologist Jerome Bruner argues that collaborative learning refines problem-solving approaches by exposing students to diverse interpretations of situations.⁵ This peer support framework facilitates the internalization of both external knowledge and critical thinking skills, transforming them into intellectual tools.

The theoretical underpinnings of collaborative learning are broadly rooted in constructivism, which posits that learning is an active construction of meaning, not passive reception of facts. We build new understanding upon existing knowledge through experience and interaction. This perspective inherently views learning as a social endeavor, intertwined with interpersonal interactions. Constructivist thought is evident in the works of educational pioneers like Maria Montessori, Piaget, John Dewey, and Bruner. While constructivism itself isn’t a teaching method, it informs pedagogies like active learning, discovery learning, and collaborative learning, all aimed at harnessing the natural social dynamics of learning.

However, this constructivist model of learning is not without its critics. A primary challenge is its unverifiable nature. How can we definitively prove or disprove such a theory? What empirical evidence could invalidate it? This challenge pervades much of the literature supporting collaborative learning, which often provides elaborate frameworks for collaborative learning processes but lacks robust evidence confirming their accurate reflection of actual learning mechanisms.

One frequently cited advantage of group work is enhanced student engagement. While it’s true that students often enjoy group activities – offering a break from individual work and a chance to socialize – the core purpose of group work is to foster interaction and motivation. Ironically, in cases where group work appears most successful, these very qualities of interactivity and motivation often pre-exist the activity itself.

Let me be clear: I am not inherently against group work. I integrate it into my teaching, particularly for knowledge recall practice or to diversify the lesson pace from direct instruction. I find it particularly effective with older high school students, who can produce remarkable outputs through debates, discussions that challenge assumptions, or collaborative resources. I am pragmatic and utilize any method that yields results. However, the assertion that group work is the optimal strategy for cultivating higher-level thinking skills and demonstrably enhances overall student outcomes remains unsubstantiated. One study promoting its benefits involved a mere 48 participants – a sample size hardly sufficient to draw sweeping conclusions. This pattern of small-scale studies with optimistic extrapolations from limited data is a recurring flaw in questionable education research. Such studies, even when multiplied, do not constitute a robust evidence base. This issue also extends to meta-analyses in this domain.

The Overlooked Downsides: Drawbacks of Group Work

The purported benefits of group work are often presented in an idealized light, yet the realities of a classroom introduce numerous factors that can undermine the effectiveness of group activities. These include:

1. Hidden Passivity: Group settings can inadvertently provide cover for student inactivity. In a group of three or four, some students may disengage, knowing others will shoulder the workload, effectively “free-riding” under the guise of collaboration.
2. Uneven Contribution: Participation within groups is rarely uniform. Some students may contribute minimally, while others dominate, leading to an imbalanced learning experience.
3. Socializing Over Substance: Group work can sometimes devolve into unproductive socialization, where students prioritize off-task interactions over the learning objective. The group activity can become an early recess, detracting from academic focus.
4. Inaccurate Assessment: While individual praise is direct and clear, group assessments often necessitate collective grades. This can lead to unfair evaluations, as individual contributions are masked within the group score. It’s crucial to minimize collective grading and emphasize individual recognition, as learning and thinking are inherently individual processes.

Examining the Evidence: What Does Research Truly Say?

“There is an ever increasing need for interdependence in all levels of our society today. Providing students with the tools to effectively work in a collaborative and cooperative environment should be our priority as teachers. Cooperative learning (CL) is one way to provide students with a well defined framework from which they can learn from one another.”⁶

This quote, taken from the opening paragraph of a paper recommended by a group work advocate, begins with unsubstantiated conjectures, opinions, and the author’s subjective values. This sets a questionable tone for the rest of the paper.

Another study I examined involved 250 students – a sample size still not particularly large. This research focused on video-recorded group work sessions after teachers and students underwent extensive group work training. Filming permissions were required, and students without permission were excluded. Both students and teachers were aware of potential filming. Groups were assigned tasks designed to showcase problem-solving and cooperation skills. The tasks themselves became a factor in the study – would different task designs have yielded different results?

Researchers then analyzed video excerpts, subjectively assessing student engagement and on-task behavior. These are inherently subjective measures, prone to variability between researchers and across different observation periods, influenced by countless conscious and subconscious factors.

The findings? The trained groups exhibited better group work skills than untrained groups. The study essentially confirmed its own premise, unsurprising given the pre-set conditions. This exemplifies a common issue in evaluations of contested educational methods like collaborative learning: the use of loaded proxy indicators.

Measuring concrete attributes like height or temperature is straightforward with tools like tape measures and thermometers. But how do we quantify abstract concepts like “learning”? We often resort to measuring proxy indicators – observable factors believed to correlate with the desired quality. For instance, while we can’t directly see electrons, we measure voltage and amperage as proxies for their activity.

In this group work study, proxy measures included engagement levels, interaction quality, and discussion duration – all observable but subjective. The results indicated that trained groups had longer discussions, maintained group cohesion better, and interrupted each other less than control groups.

Does this prove group work enhances learning? Or does it merely show that training improves group work skills? The ambiguity highlights the core problem: the study’s design, focused on measuring “better group work,” doesn’t definitively link group work proficiency to improved learning outcomes.

A recurring theme in group work literature is the assertion that training in group interaction skills is crucial for its success. This is a case of putting the cart before the horse. If we can invest effort in training students to behave effectively in groups, that same effort could be directed towards equally effective teaching in non-group settings.

In 2006, reports from the BBC and The Guardian highlighted research suggesting schools weren’t implementing group work effectively.⁷ This research, based on a larger study of 4,000 students across grades 1-9 over a year, echoed previous claims: group work enhances collaboration, learning, socialization, and motivation. However, motivation was measured via self-evaluation questionnaires, a notoriously unreliable method for objective data collection, prone to biases and inaccuracies, as evidenced by surveys on sensitive topics like honesty or substance use. Self-reported data has limitations and falls short of the rigorous data needed to evaluate learning method efficacy.

The aforementioned paper acknowledges the Hawthorne effect – where participants unconsciously modify behavior to align with perceived study objectives – but dismisses its potential impact, asserting researchers minimized it and deemed it negligible.⁸ The conclusion? Students in the program likely improve in areas the program targets. The accompanying website proclaims, “Experimental research on small groups and psychological theory emphasises that effective group work in classrooms has enormous potential in terms of increasing children’s motivation and learning.”⁹ The researchers appear to start with a pre-conceived notion, seeking confirmation rather than objective analysis, with the aim of widespread implementation in schools.

The Opportunity Cost: What’s Lost When We Choose Group Work?

Group work also raises the issue of opportunity cost. What are students not doing when engaged in group activities? Is it the most effective use of their valuable learning time? Could alternative approaches yield greater impact?

Consider “seek and return” group tasks with specific learning objectives. While potentially useful, they are time-intensive. Conveying factual information through group discovery can consume half a lesson, when direct instruction could achieve the same in five minutes.

Simply put, group work is often time-consuming, and the knowledge gained can frequently be imparted more efficiently through direct instruction. This isn’t to diminish the importance of learning beyond rote memorization, but to emphasize that factual knowledge acquisition is often less effectively facilitated through group work compared to direct teaching methods.

Another flawed concept is the notion that children learn best from each other, that peers are the primary source of necessary information. While peer interaction is valuable for exploring diverse perspectives, values, and justifications, when it comes to conveying established factual knowledge, subject matter experts are essential. Every subject encompasses a vast body of undisputed content, even within the humanities. A core teacher responsibility is to introduce students to the accumulated knowledge and insights of previous generations. Failing to do so severs the vital link between students and our intellectual heritage, forcing them to rediscover knowledge anew. My aim is for students to build upon existing knowledge, to surpass our understanding, not to hinder them by mandating self-discovery of established facts.

Finally, classroom management challenges associated with group work are often overlooked by its proponents. Group work can disrupt classroom behavior. The temptation for off-task behavior is significant, and many new teachers struggle to manage classrooms where students are facing each other, not the teacher. It creates an environment conducive to misbehavior. Many studies on group work are conducted in well-behaved classroom settings, with amenable student populations.

However, in challenging classrooms with inexperienced teachers, group work can lead to chaos, hindering independent effort, collaborative thinking, and ultimately, learning. My advice to struggling new teachers often includes: postpone group work until you establish effective classroom management.

Strategic Implementation: When Is Group Work Truly Useful?

My critique is not intended to entirely dismiss group work. It is a valid classroom approach for certain objectives. To find balanced perspectives on its optimal use, we often need to look beyond educational research to cognitive psychology or business literature, where more nuanced research exists. The work of former Harvard psychology professor J. Richard Hackman on team dynamics is particularly insightful.¹⁰ In educational settings, group work serves valuable purposes in specific contexts:

• Necessity for Task Completion: In situations where tasks are inherently collaborative, such as team sports or orchestral performances, group work is indispensable.
• Variety in Classroom Activities: Group work can effectively break up periods of individual work, providing a change of pace and stimulating student engagement through varied activities.
• Developing Collaborative Skills: Group work offers opportunities to cultivate crucial interpersonal skills: cooperation, reasoned discussion, and considering diverse viewpoints – valuable developmental goals.

These represent some of the valid rationales for group work. They align with important child development objectives, and I incorporate group work selectively to support these aims.

It may seem self-evident, but every lesson should have a clear objective, even if it evolves during the lesson. Effective teaching involves aligning student activities with methods best suited to achieving those objectives. Utility should be the guiding principle in pedagogical decision-making.

I find group work beneficial after periods of focused individual work. While directed individual learning is valuable, sustained monotony can diminish attention. If, as Aristotle argued, “man is a social animal,” then wise educators should consider student attention spans and allow opportunities for social interaction. Meaningful discussion between students is valuable when task focus can be maintained. Strategic ability grouping can yield positive outcomes: higher-ability students can challenge each other, and mixed-ability groups can facilitate peer tutoring, effectively expanding teacher support.

In my own classroom, after ensuring my older students grasp the content of a philosophy unit, I use group work to solidify learning. For example, after a unit on Kantian deontology, I pair students to debate for and against Kant’s ethical theories. After intervals, they switch positions, fostering deeper engagement with opposing arguments. Subsequently, they collaboratively create posters summarizing arguments for and against Kant, which are then peer-reviewed and refined by other groups. Finally, students engage in formal debates, applying their consolidated understanding. These activities are ideally suited for collaborative formats, leveraging peer interaction to drive recall and connect concepts. Crucially, these tasks are designed for content consolidation and application, after initial content understanding is established through direct instruction.

My concluding advice: utilize group work strategically, when it directly serves your lesson objectives, and not as a default or universally applied method. The irony of group work advocates is that while they correctly identify potential benefits, they err in overstating its potency, sometimes fetishizing it as a panacea. It is not dogma, a cure-all, or a pedagogical messiah. It is one tool among many in a teacher’s repertoire, to be used judiciously, based on informed teacher judgment regarding the specific lesson, objectives, and students – and not before foundational knowledge is in place.

Tom Bennett is a high school teacher at the Jo Richardson Community School in East London, England. He is a columnist for the Times Educational Supplement and one of the United Kingdom’s most popular teacher bloggers. He has written four books about teacher training and classroom management, and his online resources have been downloaded more than 1 million times. In 2013, he started researchED, a grass-roots organization to bring teachers and research together. This article is adapted with permission from his book Teacher Proof (London: Routledge, 2013). Visit the publisher at www.tandf.co.uk. Many Taylor & Francis and Routledge books are now available as eBooks.

Endnotes

4. Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, ed. Michael Cole (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).

5. Jerome Bruner, “Vygotsky: A Historical and Conceptual Perspective,” in Culture, Communication, and Cognition: Vygotskian Perspectives, ed. James V. Wertsch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 21–34.

6. Folake Abass, “Cooperative Learning and Motivation,” Gengo to bunka [Language and Culture] (Institute for Language Education, Aichi University), no. 18 (2008): 15–35, http://taweb.aichi-u.ac.jp/~goken/bulletin/pdfs/NO18/02FolakeAbass.pdf.

7. “Group Work ‘Raises Attainment,’” BBC News, March 31, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4864186.stm; and Alexandra Smith, “Group Work Benefits Pupils, Study Finds,” Guardian, March 31, 2006.

8. Peter Blatchford, Ed Baines, Christine Rubie-Davies, Paul Bassett, and Anne Chowne, “The Effect of a New Approach to Group Work on Pupil-Pupil and Teacher-Pupil Interactions,” Journal of Educational Psychology 98 (2006): 750–765.

9. “Background to SPRinG,” SPRinG Project, accessed November 17, 2014, www.spring-project.org.uk/spring-ABOUT.htm.

10. J. Richard Hackman and Nancy Katz, “Group Behavior and Performance,” in Handbook of Social Psychology, vol. 2, ed. Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010), 1208–1251.