How to help learners think together, not just work together

25 June 2026

Mandy Senior is an Assistant Principal and Director of Trust Improvement for Teaching, Learning and Professional Development at Thomas Rotherham College (TRC), part of Inspire Learning Trust. Serving over 1,600 students aged 16–19, TRC offers A Levels, vocational and T Levels within a diverse and inclusive community. The college is dedicated to ensuring every learner thrives and leaves fully prepared for their next steps.

Mandy Senior

Assistant Principal at Thomas Rotherham College (TRC)

Walk into almost any classroom and you’ll see students seated in groups. They’re talking, writing, producing something together. At a glance, it looks like collaboration.

But if we look a little closer, are they really thinkingtogether - or just dividing the work and splitting tasks?

“You do Part A, I’ll do Part B.”

“I’ll scribe, if you feedback”

In many of our classrooms, “group work” is common, but genuine collaborative learning is much rarer.

True collaborative learning is something much more purposeful. It’s co-constructing knowledge through interaction, challenge and shared reasoning.

If we are serious about improving outcomes - particularly for our most disadvantaged learners - we need structures that make this kind of thinking unavoidable.

To support genuine collaborative learning and move students from working alongside each other to thinking together, we used a deceptively simple structure: the ‘Effects Tree’.

What is an Effects Tree?

An Effects Tree is a visual thinking tool that helps students map the consequences of an idea by exploring cause-and-effect relationships collaboratively. Starting from a central stimulus (e.g. ‘What happens if rivers become polluted?’), students work in groups to build outward in chains: What happens next? Why? What follows? This moves them beyond recall to connecting and extending ideas, tracing direct and indirect impacts. What begins as a diagram becomes a shared model of thinking, helping learners see concepts not as isolated facts but as interconnected systems of cause and consequence.

Example in Practice

As the EEF highlights, collaboration is most effective when interaction is carefully designed and purposeful. We used ‘Effects Trees’ to provide a simple structured approach to collaborative learning. Their impact depends on deliberate implementation.

Use small groups (3–5)

EEF collaborative learning toolkit recommends group sizes of 3-5 learners.

Optimal group size ensures all students have the opportunity to participate meaningfully.

Step 1: Model first

Demonstrate how to build an effects chain, thinking aloud to make reasoning explicit.

  • Students collaboratively build ‘effects’ chains – this works best on large sheets of paper – one per group

Step 2: Discuss

Each step is discussed and refined, identifying effect types (social, economic, environmental), spotting missing links, and considering mitigation. We noticed that discussion doesn’t always happen automatically. We used prompts to drive discussion:

  • What happens next?
  • Is this direct or indirect?
  • Can we extend this?
  • How could we mitigate this?

These require students to explain, justify, and evaluate, strengthening reasoning through talk. This shifts thinking from simple analysis to evaluation and problem-solving.

We found that simple, consistent prompts sparked deeper thinking while helping learners stay focused. Crucially, because there is always another layer of cause and effect to explore, the task is never truly complete. As a result, instead of aiming for completion, the focus is on depth of understanding - pushing learners beyond surface-level thinking.

Step 3: Review and refine

Groups compare their trees, discussing:

  • Strong reasoning
  • Missing links
  • Alternative pathways

This makes thinking visible and embeds feedback through peer discussion.

Example of a basic Effects Tree

Promoting access and participation

Students who lack confidence, prior knowledge, or experience of academic talk—particularly those facing disadvantage and the additional barriers this can bring benefit from clear, easy-to-follow scaffolds for collaborative learning.

Providing these structures can level the playing field - giving all learners a way in, it allows learners to build on each other’s thinking, reduce the isolation that can come with struggling in silence, and ignite new ideas through dialogue. As students hear, challenge, and extend one another’s reasoning, their own understanding deepens—moving beyond what they could achieve alone by creating a more inclusive, intellectually rich learning experience.

“It really helps because everyone talks about and adds their own links, and when I see how other people connect ideas, it gives me new angles I wouldn’t have thought of on my own.”

What we noticed

We are beginning to see encouraging early signs that Effects Trees and structured collaborative learning support not only in-the-moment learning, but also the development of independent study habits and deeper thinking over time. Students report using them across subjects, highlighting both their transferability and value as a revision tool to support recall and test understanding.

This is increasingly reflected in the quality of peer interaction we hear in the classroom.

A call to action

If you do one thing this term, make it this:

Read the EEF guidance on Collaborative Learning and structure some collaborative learning into your lessons.

Then reflect:

  • Did every student contribute?
  • Did the quality of talk improve?
  • Did students think more deeply than usual?

And if the answer is yes, share it. Model it. Build it into your curriculum.

Because when learners shift from ‘working together’ to ‘thinking together’, time spent is more impactful.

And structured collaborative learning might just be one of the simplest mechanisms to getting there.