In the article "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind'," Kenneth A. Bruffee writes about collaborative learning style and the effect it has on students. He writes about how composition teachers are using it more often because, " It is viewed as a way of engaging students more deeply with the text and also as an aspect of professors' engagement with the professional community" (Bruffee). If this is the case, then it really is beneficial to work in groups as opposed to individually.
It is easy to relate to this article because of the fact that we have been doing collaborative learning in our composition class. An example of this is when we each picked a passage out of The Twelfth Night that we did not understand and passed the paper around for others to comment on before posting it on our blog. Not only did this help me learn by understanding the passage from the viewpoint of others, but I also enjoyed the exercise because it was interesting to see the posted paragraphs that were a mash-up of so many different thoughts.
I would recommend collaborative learning to all classes because sometimes it really is easier to learn from other students as opposed to the teacher. When we learn from our peers, we know that they just learned the material and will better understand how we view the material.
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I completely agree with your last paragraph about how we tend to learn more from our peers than our professor. It's not that the professor isn't qualified or a supreme teacher, it's just that sometimes it is easier to relate and give suggestions to someone in your own age range. It is helpful to do activities like mentioned above in your blog because we get to receive input from our fellow classmates and then in the end we can refer to our professor to give us a final revision of our work.
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