Given the effectiveness of collaborative planning, a teacher must know how to group students according to rate, ability, compatibility and style of learning.   If students cannot collaborate with their peers, they will not have the interpersonal skills to be successful in the real world.  When teaching through collaboration, it is therefore important to also teach students how to work together.  Sometimes I group students because I know one person in each group can lead, write, draw or take on some role relevant to the task.  Other times, I group students so they can practice how to get along with people they normally don’t like in order to accomplish the task. 

My own knowledge of effective collaboratie lesson plans has grown since I first began teaching. My first semester as a teacher, I thought it would be a good idea to give my unruly class assigned seats.  I printed out name tags and stuck each name where I though it should go based on what I could remember about who was friends with whom.  This is before I figured out that my students are naturally social, and tend to make friends with whomever they sit next to on the first day of school.  The problem was that I didn’t take anything else about the students into consideration.  I barely knew their names, being it was the first or second week of school, so I didn’t even know if the kids were sitting in the right seat.  Needless to say, the assigned seats didn’t last long.  Most were vandalized or scratched off within a month.  Upon reflection, I came to the realization that neither my reasons nor my methods for grouping students was right.  I have since learned that collaborative learning is not just sitting students at tables together for no reason; rather, some authentic task must be the central component.