Bruffee collaborative learning

  What is collaborative learning? Is it a student-centered learning style? Is it the ESL learning approach? And is this approach being applied to other fields? Who is it for? Is it for the students from disadvantaged backgrounds, or for students with wholes in their education? Or will it include every type of student? These are some of the questions generated by the Bruffee and Hawks' essays.

As I mentioned in the classroom discussion I prefer the old traditional learning style. On the other hand, collaborative learning is a benign idea that could prove productive at times. It allows students to work together and be interactive and reflective on the material taught or ideas inspired in class. However, despite its positive qualities, I don't think collaborative learning works in every situation or with every student  Personally, I prefer learning from a teacher who profoundly knows his discipline and enjoys engaging the students, but this doesn't exclude listening to peer members. I particularly prefer it when I'm sitting in a humanities or literature course analyzing short stories and poetry and then writing about it. An insightful literature teacher can provide frames of windows for the students' imaginations, into which they can glance and experience meaning; perhaps even inducing an  "aha" moment for a few students, as one professor always did for me. The teacher will illicit thoughts, insights, and lure students into a class discussion. An imaginative literature teacher is skillful at teaching about irony, foreshadowing, and other literary techniques, as well as reocurring patterns, and show how they enhance artistry, depth, and meaning in fiction. The collaborative approach could then be a means for peer members to discover these reoccurring patterns and  techniques in real life, or in their personal lives, and to draw parallels/connections between life and the events in the story. I think collaborative learning would serve ideally as a supplement to tradition style learning, not as a replacement. If peer teaching replaced the literature teacher in the classroom, it would be a sad state of affairs: Personally, I'd feel cheated of a quality education. I believe students should question collaborating learning's place in the classroom as well.