Collaborators or Cheaters?

Intentional Community
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As I was watching my students work collaboratively on a review packet I couldn't help but feel as if they might be cheating. I suddenly realized that I had never really though about the difference between collaborating and cheating. Sir Ken Robinson briefly mentions (10m:05s) collaborating vs. cheating in his RSA talk but while I knew there was a difference I hadn't yet decided what the line was. Can they copy answers from one another? Can they split the work in sections and then group the work together? They have done all of this in my classroom but I've never really considered it cheating.

Before being a teacher I worked for a private business and in that business we constantly collaborated. We know that each person understood a specific set of information and that we could rely on that person to understand their aspect of the project. This can be seen as similar to students in the classroom. When given a group project or told they can work in groups I notice that some students split the work into sections and then once each section is finished they combine the work together. Is there anything wrong with this? I am really not sure. I want the students to learn collaborative skills but I also want them to be able to do well on the tests they need to pass. What bothers me is that I understand that humans naturally collaborate (we evolved to do so), but when all parties involved must learn all of the same facts, is collaboration really beneficial?

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