Clifford S. Zimmerman, Northwestern University School of Law Many students learn from each other as well as, if not better than, they do from us. While traditional lecture reaches some students, hundreds of studies, ranging from elementary through graduate education, have proven that group or collaborative work reaches a wider range of students, including those who learn visually, experientially, or through other non-traditional means. This proposed session will present a framework to enable attendees to implement collaborative methods, a collective term for both cooperative learning and collaborative learning, in their classroom. In part, studies have shown that collaborative work increases students’ achievement, enables teachers to take students to higher levels of understanding, and removes much of the stress associated with education. Collaborative work also reflects the practical side of law firm work. Though not used as often as possible, collaborative work has proven valuable in legal education in both the clinical and legal writing contexts, and can easily be extended to more traditional settings. See Clifford S. Zimmerman, “Thinking Beyond My Own Interpretation:” Reflections on Collaborative and Cooperative Theory in the Law School Curriculum, 31 Arizona St. L.J. 397 (1999) (addressing concerns of the academy and laying a foundation for using collaborative methods in legal education in general and legal writing in particular). My presentation will particularly address facilitating this implementation in the law school classroom by focusing on collaborative methods’ substantive, cognitive, and psychological/emotional benefits and basic workings. The benefits of collaborative work are linked to and address both the common or typical concerns that students have in law school and the typical teaching challenges that law teachers encounter in the classroom. Thus, collaborative work is a critical tool for experienced teachers who are looking to improve or diversify their pedagogy. In addition, I will also address the building blocks of collaborative assignments and anticipatory concerns for implementation (the handouts will provide examples). This will provide many of the planning considerations necessary to optimize the benefits from this pedagogy. Overall, collaborative methods are tailor-made for teachers who seek the advancement of all of their students. Over the past eight years, I have explored the underlying theory and experienced uniformly positive results with collaborative methods. From this, I have identified many very successful methods and figured out how to avoid most pitfalls. At Northwestern, I work with the entire faculty on making collaborative method part of the whole curriculum. This task involves not just using group work, but rather understanding the inner workings of the pedagogy such that it can fit into any size or subject-based class. These experiences will result in a most productive and fruitful conference session.