Apredizaje Colaborativo En Ingles

COLLABORATIVE VERSUS COOPERATIVE LEARNING
A COMPARISON OF THE TWO CONCEPTS WHICH WILL HELP US UNDERSTAND THE UNDERLYING NATURE OF INTERACTIVE LEARNING
By Ted Panitz
I have been searching for many years for the Holy Grail of interactive learning, a distinction between collaborative and cooperative learning definitions. I am getting closer to my elusive goal all the time. I believe confusionarises when people look at processes associated with each concept and see a certain amount of overlap or inter-concept usage. I will clarify the definitions of collaborative and cooperative learning first by presenting my definitions of the two terms and reviewing those of other authors who have helped clarify my thinking and second by presenting and analyzing the educational benefits ofcollaborative/cooperative learning techniques.
The underlying premise for collaborative and cooperative learning is founded in constructivist epistemology. Johnson, Johnson & Smith (1991) have summarized these principles in their definition of a new paradigm of teaching. " First, knowledge is constructed, discovered, and transformed by students. Faculty create the conditions within which students canconstruct meaning from the material studied by processing it through existing cognitive structures and then retaining it in long-term memory where it remains open to further processing and possible reconstruction. Second, students actively construct their own knowledge. Learning is conceived of as something a learner does, not something that is done to the learner. Students do not passively acceptknowledge from the teacher or curriculum. Students activate their existing cognitive structures or construct new ones to subsume the new input. Third, faculty effort is aimed at developing students' competencies and talents. Fourth, education is a personal transaction among students and between the faculty and students as they work together. Fifth, all of the above can only take place within acooperative context. Sixth, teaching is assumed to be a complex application of theory and research that requires considerable teacher training and continuous refinement of skills and procedures" (p1:6)
The following will serve as a starting point for this discussion. A basic definition of the terms collaborative and cooperative reduced to their simplest terms, is presented:
Collaboration is a philosophyof interaction and personal lifestyle where individuals are responsible for their actions, including learning and respect the abilities and contributions of their peers; Cooperation is a structure of interaction designed to facilitate the accomplishment of a specific end product or goal through people working together in groups.
Before we proceed with the theoretical underpinning of each methodit would be helpful to describe the differences between the two paradigms in terms of an actual class.
     In the cooperative model the teacher maintains complete control of the class, even though the students work in groups to accomplish a goal of a course. The cooperative teacher asks a specific question such as, “What were the five causes of the start of  World War II?”  The teacher providesadditional articles for the students to read and analyze, beyond the text, and then asks the students to work in groups to answer the question. The groups then present their results to the whole class and discuss their reasoning. A follow up question may then be posed to the groups to analyze the United Nations to determine if this has been an effective organization to prevent world wars and tomake recommendations on possible changes needed to make the UN more effective. The teacher might use specific structures, such as a Jig Saw model, to help facilitate the group interactions. He/she might require a specific product such as a term paper or report, class presentations, and an exam at the end of the topic. The students do the work necessary to consider the material being covered but...