The paper has the aim of discussing and asserting the importance of collaborative activities in schools. It has been based on a wide range literature reviews directed to: a) theorizing about the psychological processes involved in these activities, guided mainly by Socio-historic psychology; and b) analyzing the results of different investigations that focused on collaborative activities among teachers and students, in order to draw some useful conclusions about the area of education. The review was carried out with the help of research reports published in books, journals, theses, dissertations and annals of traditional events in Brazil and other countries. It also includes the results of investigations taken place within the research project "Collaborative work in Education: development and benefits", coordinated by the author, who has been dedicated to this study of collaborative work for the last five years. The text is not intended to constitute to be "state of the art" about the subject. It might even fail to include findings of investigations considered important by other researchers. Due to the extent of the production related to this topic, its complete revision would be never-ending. Therefore, the paper presents pieces of works considered to be methodologically sound and theoretically relevant and have been collected with the aim of summarizing and publicizing, at least in part, the knowledge produced about the importance of collaborative work in Education.
collaborative work; teacher work; learning; Socio-historic psychology