Student to Student Interactions in the Classroom

My practicum teacher uses student to student interaction very regularly in the classroom and focuses a lot on doing centers for math and cooperative learning. The classroom is set up with 4 people in each group around the room so no one is ever working alone. Whenever he does centers, he incorporates them teaching each other and the teacher helping out in each one. Also, he makes sure that there are different students from different academic levels in each group so that not all the struggling students are together and lost. The instructional ideas that I have seen in my practicum classroom that I will use in my own is using cooperative and group learning so that students learn how to work together and build off each other's ideas instead of me constantly lecturing in the front of the classroom. I want to focus more on helping them out and guiding them but have the students mainly learn how to be independent learners. I also want to have tables of 4 or so which will give each person a partner and more ideas and different perspectives for problems for students to go off on.