Collaborative Learning in the Classroom: A Guide to Evaluation.

Over the last decade collaborative learning has become an important method for college English teachers, who now realize that their own education rarely taught them how colleagues work together to learn and to make meaning in a discipline, and who have rejected philosophically the kinds of approaches to teaching that isolate learners instead of drawing them together. In addition, the problems for education in the seventies and eighties-the changes in student populations, the growth in the number of nontraditional learners in the collegiate body, the alienating nature of learning in large classrooms with too many students, the acknowledged decline of freshmen entry-level skills in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking-these and other challenges to an earlier educational paradigm have shaken our faith in conventional teaching strategies and have called to question our obsession with the major metaphor for learning over the last three hundred years, "the human mind as the Mirror of Nature." As Ken Bruffee has put it, this old metaphor insists that teachers give students as much information as they can "to insure that their mental mirrors reflect reality as completely as possible" and also insists that we help our students "through the exercise of intellect or development of sensibility, to sharpen and sensitize their inner eyesight" ("Liberal Education" 98). In this ground-breaking essay, Bruffee, drawing upon the works of Thomas Kuhn, L. S. Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, M. L. J. Abercrombie, and Richard Rorty, advances an alternate concept of knowledge as socially justified belief. According to this concept, knowledge depends on social relations, not on reflections of reality. Knowledge is "a collaborative artifact" (103) that results from "intellectual negotiations" (107). Bruffee explores the curricular implications of knowledge collaboratively generated, always with one eye on the classroom and the other on the philosophical underpinnings of the new paradigm. But Bruffee's model, built on the delicate and necessary tension between theory and practice, may not, I suspect, have guided much of what teachers are calling collaborative learning today. I mention this suspicion out of my recent investigations into the issue of assessment generally as a force in postsecondary