Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom Chapters 1-3

Children learn by talking and working together. I have noticed that even though a teachers intuition tends to believe that this talk is off task, in reality, students are very capable of making connections and holding converstations that are on task. In fact, students tend to learn more about the content when they are able to learn from each other. This kind of learning is considered active learning as opposed to passive which would be a teacher centered model that allows students to take notes, rarely ask questions, and at times tune out of what is happening in the class. Groups are particularly useful for mixed academic and language skills. This is because you can either create heterogenous groups or homogeneous groups depending on the assignment, allowing for students in these mixed settings to succeed. However, the author admits that he does not know "whether the principles hold under all conditions." I think what I would like to learn about some more is how much growth actually happens during groupwork compared to the alternative, and if empirical evidence is necessary. I have found through this whole program how interesting and important groupwork actually is in academic learning.
Why Groupwork- Groupwork is effective for achieving certain intellectual and social learning goals. For starters, students grow very fast intellectually when they are able to bounce ideas off of each other, sparing new ideas and contesting others. I remember in college my favorite thing to do when I was reading something very interesting was to find somebody and talk to them about it. Socially, the growth should be easy to see. Obviously, students working together in groups are going to learn how to cooperate. Groupwork also allows students to get the abstract concepts that are usually so difficult to achieve in other sorts of classrooms. Even though the author talks about how groupwork is not good for all situations, I think that groupwork can excel in most, if not all situations. I would like to learn more about this.
The Dilemma of Groupwork is mostly about the problems that occur during groupwork when things are not fully thought out by teachers and the social hierarchies that occur among groups on several levels.