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Cooperative Learning
Teachers can encourage students to relate
to each other as they learn in three fundamental ways: competition,
or working hard to be the best; individualization, or working
hard alone to achieve one’s own goals; and cooperation,
or working hard together to combine ideas and provide mutual
support. Most teachers and parents have had direct experience
with competition and individualization.
Most of us have had benign individualized
experiences, in which we did our own work, got our own grades,
and didn’t much care or notice what the girl next to us was
doing. When we had any experience of cooperative learning,
it was likely to be outside the classroom, on a yearbook committee
or a sports team, or with a scout troop or youth group associated
with a church, temple, or mosque. What made these cooperative
experiences memorable was probably pride in a product or a
winning season. And we are likely to remember the people who
were on our “team,” how each helped us and we helped them.
We might even recall exceeding our personal best in their
company and how, in spite of the pressures of adolescence,
we became friends with people who weren’t exactly like us.
These are the benefits of cooperative learning.
There’s one more compelling reason to teach
and support students to learn cooperatively. It works. Cooperative
learning, studied over 90 years, results in more productivity
and higher achievement than either competitive or individual
learning.
In “An Overview of Cooperative Learning”,
Roger T. and David W. Johnson cite five essential elements
of cooperative learning.
- Students need to understand that it is
their group effort that will be judged, not their individual
efforts. The technical term for this is positive interdependence,
and the teacher needs to articulate the organizing goals of
the lesson as group goals. A second facet of positive interdependence
is that each group member has an essential and unique contribution
to make to the group project. Sometimes, teachers can structure
tasks so that this is concretely true, as well, especially
when students are learning how to interact cooperatively.
For example, each student may be given only one clue to a
puzzle the solution to which requires all pieces.
- When students are being evaluated as
a group, they begin to help each other in many ways. They
help and support each other, share ideas, give worthwhile
feedback, and listen to other ways of doing things. These
helpful and beneficial interactions follow soon after the
group starts to realize and use its own resources wisely.
- Although the group is assessed on their
collective work, it is equally important to ensure that individuals
are held accountable for their contributions. There are many
techniques teachers can use to ensure accountability, including
giving individual tests, observing and recording the frequency
of each group member’s contribution, and having students teach
each other.
- Students learn how to get along. They
acquire and deepen their social skills as cooperative learning
continues. Their group work improves as their social skills
sharpen, for they communicate more clearly and solve their
conflicts more efficiently. Teachers can provide explicit
help in this area, too.
- Finally, students need time to talk about
how well the group worked together, aside and apart from the
time spent on the learning task. Small-group processing helps
hone and make conscious the process of working together.
Practical Tips for the Beginner
At first glance, it may appear that cooperative
learning is better suited to social studies and science projects
than it is to math. In fact, cooperative learning works extremely
well for mathematics. It reduces anxiety, creates a friendly
and supportive atmosphere, and vastly increases how much children
learn, remember, and use from their math studies in school.
Here are some concrete tips. If your students
have never worked together cooperatively, remember that this
is a learned skill. Start small, do your own reading on the
subject, and make sure you leave time at the end of every
group project to discuss what made it work well or not.
If you inherit or are running a class where
children sit in rows, minding their own business (at least
most of the time!), and are individually accountable, you
might begin by having students share ideas in pairs. But remember,
you may have to discuss how to move desks quietly and efficiently
without spilling things, you may have to describe the strength
of voice that works when all the pairs are talking at once,
and you may have to review how to take turns. Learning to
work cooperatively is a skill a group can certainly learn,
but it is respectful and effective to treat it as a serious
component of the curriculum in its own right, especially at
the beginning of the year. Bit by bit, you can increase the
size of the group, stopping at four, probably, and you can
increase the responsibilities of the group and what you expect
from them.
Among the materials to help you structure
a cooperative learning process, the EQUALS program in California
has published a collection of cooperative lessons in which
each group member receives a clue. Only when each clue is
shared can the problem be solved. This collection, called
Get It Together, includes mathematics activities that range
from fourth grade to high school levels in difficulty and
runs across the various strands of mathematics, including
the use of manipulatives. These activities give concrete support
to the principle that each group member has a unique and essential
contribution to make.
Another technique to help students learn
how to learn cooperatively is that of role assignment. You
will find a number of role configurations as you read various
sources about cooperative learning, but here’s one possible
assignment: reader, recorder, checker of understanding, and
encourager of participation. You can observe and give feedback
as to whether students are fulfilling these roles. Your feedback
can also be offered during processing time at the conclusion
of each cooperative lesson.
One technique for making sure that no one
falls “through the cracks” is to state clearly that, at the
conclusion of the project, one person from the group will
report on their learning, progress, or outcomes. This person,
though, will be chosen randomly. It’s possible to number students
and use a spinner to decide who will give the group’s report
(and this may promote an investigation into whether the spinner
is, indeed, fair!)
Conclusion
Cooperative learning achieves so many worthwhile
goals that it’s beneficial and satisfying to take the
time to learn and teach it to a group of students. Not only
do children learn the material more effectively, they learn
about each other and themselves in ways that extend far beyond
the classroom, into the lunchroom, the playground, and the
community. It changes the way children interact in a fundamental
way.
About the Author
Christina Wright, Ph.D., is a math consultant
living in Seattle, Washington. She is an adjunct faculty member
at Pacific Oaks College Northwest and a frequent facilitator
for the online-line Bank Street Forum.
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