Research on student stress has mainly focused on student-as-individual. Similarly, student cognitive load and student learning outcomes within a classroom have been examined primarily from a student-as-individual perspective. In a classroom setting, especially in an engineering classroom where collaborative learningCollaborative learning is the norm, using a community of learnersCommunity of learners lens to view the students in the classroom and model the community of learnersCommunity of learners as a social systemSocial system that has emerging propertiesProperty (e.g., working in pairs reduces stress and cognitive load) that can affect individual students will yield better outcomes for both the educator and the students. Using the community of learnersCommunity of learners lens to improve student learning in collaborative engineering classrooms, we developed a Community of LearnersCommunity of learners as a Social SystemSocial system (CLaSS) conceptual model and presented our preliminary data and analysis to validate our CLaSS conceptual model in this paper.