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Groups of students or employees working together to solve problems, gain conceptual understanding, or create new approaches are expected to yield results significantly better than when working individually. Classroom collaboration leads to increased learning and retention, improved interpersonal skills, and enhanced appreciation for and commitment to the educational process. With the increased discussion of its benefits, there is more emphasis on including collaboration in the classroom. The challenge for today's faculty and students is to learn what their roles and expectations are in the successful collaborative environment. The purpose of this study was to design a curriculum for instructors in techniques for creating collaborative environments. In addition to reviewing the current literature to learn about collaborative environments in the college classroom, instructors were interviewed to learn about their experiences and successes with collaborative learning. Information from the literature review and the faculty interviews were used to propose the curriculum. Principles of collaborative learning evident through the literature and the interviews are that it requires trust, development of relationships, conversation, incorporating differences, the teacher as learner, and students be responsible for their own learning. The instructor must be able to create that environment by teaching social and collaborative skills, being willing to self-disclose, assessing where students are and by taking care of technical tasks such as preplanning, assigning students to groups, designing collaborative activities and evaluating results of the collaborative process, the group's product and the individual's contribution. Caffarella's (1994) interactive model for program development provided the structure for the development of the curriculum. Through the application of the model, curriculum ideas were explored and narrowed into the development of the program objectives. Transfer of learning activities incorporated into the curriculum are reliant upon intense practice of collaborative skills throughout the course. The learning is experiential.

The functioning of a teacher support team is an important aspect in improving quality of education, because it has as its purpose the enhancement of collaboration and support to educators and development of conditions for learners to become more successful. This research study explored the functioning of teacher support teams in primary and elementary schools of the Western Cape Education Department of South Africa and Massachusetts in the United States of America, in assisting educators of learners with special needs in mainstream schools.

Social reform in the 1960's initiated growth in two seemingly separate educational movements in response to dissatisfaction with the traditional positivistic education system. These two movements, writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) and homeschooling, share pedagogy and methodology based upon social epistemology, and they share two teaching techniques stemming from this methodology: collaboration and writing. While homeschooling was the successful method of education for centuries, the last two centuries have seen an evolution through the one-room schoolhouse to present day positivistic educational institutions. Language-centered teaching techniques have existed as long, beginning with such educators as Isocrates and continuing with such educators as Aristotle, Quintilian, Augustine, Erasmus, George Campbell, and Fred Newton Scott, and during the past two decades, WAC proponents have incorporated the use of collaboration and writing as instruments of learning in every discipline. Unfortunately, it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of these teaching techniques in existing WAC programs because of the number of variables involved. These techniques were measured in a homeschool situation, however, where the variables could be controlled. This ethnographic study, which took place during the Spring 1994 semester with three ninth-grade female students placed in a homeschool situation, used both quantitative and qualitative methods to measure the effectiveness of collaboration and writing in all disciplines. Pre-tests revealed that, at the beginning of this study, these three students performed at very different levels of ability ; regardless of ability, however, each experienced dramatic increases in learning. The quantitative measures, Wechsler Individual Achievement Test and Ennis-Weir Critical Thinking Essay Test, revealed unprecedented gains in math reasoning, reading comprehension, listening comprehension, oral expression, written expression, language composite, and critical thinking skills. These pre/ post-tests, triangulated with assessment of reading journals, daily journals, individual essays, collaborative essays, and video-taped sessions, produced a narrative which describes each student's characteristics, learning style and response to these learning/teaching methods. The results imply that homeschool education has been successful due to collaboration and writing. Furthermore, this study strongly suggests that collaboration and writing effect learning in all disciplines and recommends restructuring of traditional education to implement these teaching/learning techniques. / Department of English

The functioning of a teacher support team is an important aspect in improving quality of education, because it has as its purpose the enhancement of collaboration and support to educators and development of conditions for learners to become more successful. This research study explored the functioning of teacher support teams in primary and elementary schools of the Western Cape Education Department of South Africa and Massachusetts in the United States of America, in assisting educators of learners with special needs in mainstream schools.