Collaborative Learning Structures

Giving students the ability to work together and assist each other is an excellent strategy to use in the classroom. It can not only help in decoding, but also in many other learning situations. You can begin by pairing students. Put a student who has mastered the content with a student who is having difficulty. Then have them work together to review the concept. When teaching a new skill you can also pair students’ to begin working on the skill together. It allows the students’ to verbalize what they are doing which is a use of oral/auditory learning.

Students can also work in teams. They are assigned roles so that each member of the team knows their role in the group. These roles can include facilitator, data manager, supply manager, and reporter. The teacher assigns a task to the group and they work together to complete the task. In this case it could be decoding unfamiliar words or working with word banks to review new words.