Since the last decades, collaborative learning (CL) has internationally received increasing interest in primary schools. During CL, two or more learners depend on and are accountable for their own and one another’s active learning process (Dillenbourg, 1999). Numerous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of this teaching strategy at three different domains: CL appears to promote cognitive learning processes, social-emotional functioning, and psychological development (e.g., Johnson & Johnson, 1999). Given these positive results, the role of the teacher in developing and supporting CL activities came to the attention, since the pedagogical behaviour of a teacher is highly important in guaranteeing the promising results (Gillies, Ashman, & Terwel, 2007). This creates a challenging task for teacher education: they are responsible for familiarizing student teachers with the background CL and its practical implementation in the classroom (Veenman et al., 2002).

In the professionalization of teachers, instructional planning is perceived as an important process and it is therefore often emphasized in European countries (Baylor, 2002). By planning their lessons, student teachers are gaining experience in thinking through what they will teach, how they will do it and how they will evaluate. Although the importance of instructional planning is often emphasized, only limited studies actually address the effectiveness of instructional planning. Naafs et al. (2002) and Carnahan (in Frudden, 2001) found a positive relationship between detailed lesson plans and final student achievement, since a thorough preparation seems to allow more time-on-task for the students and therefore more learning opportunities. In addition, a positive effect of planning was found on the instructional behaviour of pre-service physical (Byra & Coulon, 1994) and math teachers (Meyen & Greer, 2009). Therefore, Frudden (2001) suggests that a thorough lesson preparation is the key to a successful lesson. When implementing a complex teaching strategy such as CL, the importance of good lesson preparation is even increasing (Gillies & Boyle, 2010). Teachers are challenged to ensure the five key principles of CL: positive interdependence, individual accountability, direct interaction, the promotion of social skills, and the evaluation of the learning process (Johnson & Johnson, 1999). In addition, CL sets high expectations for the classroom management, the development of the learning tasks and materials, the evaluation, the guiding of the pupils, et cetera.

Notwithstanding the fact that the effectiveness of CL largely depends on the pedagogical behaviour of the teacher (Gillies, Ashman, & Terwel, 2007), little attention is, however, paid to teachers’ actual preparation of CL environments. Therefore, the present study investigates instructional plans with CL activities, made by student teachers in the bachelor’s course to become a primary school teacher. Two research questions are addressed:

(1)    How can we analyze the quality of instructional plans including a type of CL?

(2)    How do student teachers structure CL environments in their lesson plans?

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