Answer these questions for Cooperative learning

Answer these questions for Cooperative learning

· How can it be implemented effectively?

· What are the benefits?

Readings for questions 1

Implementing cooperative learning

When you use cooperative learning, your role is not to deliver information or provide explanations (as it usually is with direct instruction). Rather, your role is to plan, manage and monitor the learning environment so that students can collaborate and engage productively in learning. Cooperative learning will be most successful when cooperation is necessary for success – that is, when it would be difficult (or impossible) for students to learn without cooperating with one another. It is not appropriate to simply contrive a situation in which students are required to cooperate when they could learn better individually (see Boo et al., 2001, for examples of this pitfall). If students are not familiar with the type of cooperative learning that you want to use, it is best to start with short, frequent activities and leave the students in the same groups for an extended time. A cooperative learning session will generally proceed as follows:

· Assign students to groups.

· Explain clearly the outcomes that students are to achieve and provide clear directions about the academic tasks that each group will undertake.

· Remind students of your expectations of them (particularly in relation to helping one another learn) and of the cooperative goal structure (the rewards for learning).

· Explain how the learning of individual students will be assessed.

· Provide students with resources if this is necessary.

· Remind students how long they have for the cooperative activities and get them started.

· Circulate to provide assistance as required, to monitor the activities and learning of the students, and to make notes of matters that will need to be dealt with once the group sessions have finished. Do not meddle – allow the groups to deal with minor problems themselves. However, it is not the students’ responsibility to regulate peer behaviour that is seriously inappropriate; you must do that.

· At the appropriate time, bring the lesson to a logical conclusion.

· Evaluate student achievement and help them assess how well they collaborated with one another

The last three steps will be different if the student collaboration is based on the use of ICT, as explained later in this chapter. Of course, teaching is never a simple task in which everything goes strictly according to plan. You will have to attend to many unexpected issues and you will have to keep experimenting to find cooperative learning approaches that suit you and your students. You can learn a lot by listening to your students as they engage in cooperative tasks.

Forming groups

There is no simple answer to the question of how groups should be formed for cooperative learning. You have three choices: allow the learners to form their own groups, form the groups by random selection or place individual learners in groups for some special reason. If you take the last approach, the basic choices are to try to make the groups heterogeneous (as mixed as possible in terms of learner abilities, gender, etc.) or to try to make the groups homogeneous (one gender, similar abilities, similar cultures, etc.). Slavin (1994) claims that the achievement of social goals through cooperative learning depends on each group being heterogeneous, with learners of both sexes, mixed races or cultures, and mixed abilities, a view supported by Aronson (2012). Gillies and Boyle (2006) explain why they found mixed grouping effective in Australian Grades 4 to 6 classes. Felder and Brent (1994:7) also argue strongly for mixed groups on the basis that ‘weaker students gain from seeing how better students study and approach problems, and the stronger students gain a deeper understanding of the subject by teaching it to others’. Stahl (1997:8) goes further and suggests that groups should be mixed as much as possible, ‘first on the basis of academic abilities and then on the basis of ethnic background, race, gender, etc.’ However, Abrami and Chambers (1996) suggest that the issue is not so clear-cut. (Don’t be worried by this; it is not unusual for educational researchers to disagree.) They suggest that:

· low-ability learners learn more in mixed-ability groups than when grouped with other low-ability learners

· medium-ability learners learn best when working with other medium-ability learners

· ability grouping has no effect on the achievement of high-ability learners

Curry (1997) found that mixed-ability grouping can encourage lower-ability students to persist at difficult tasks, but high-ability students may lose their incentive to learn when placed in mixed-ability groups. Moody and Gifford (1990) found that there were no differences in achievement between homogeneous and mixed-ability groups, but both boys and girls performed better when they were not in mixed-gender groups. Terwel et al. (2001) claim that high-ability students (especially in high-ability classes) benefit more from cooperative learning because they are better able to provide solicited explanations to their fellow students.

Vermette (1995) suggests that groups should be mixed (in terms of ethnicity, gender and social class) but they should also be balanced – not just one girl in a group of boys, for example. He also suggests that learners should be told that the groups are mixed in order to take advantage of the different strengths of individual learners, not for the purpose of developing friendships or reinforcing existing social groupings. Logan (1988) warns that some forms of diversity in groups can be counterproductive. Pairing learners who, say, have a personality clash will rarely help them to overcome their dislike for one another, and grouping learners who have low self-images with those who have over-inflated egos may cause conflict.

So where does all this, sometimes conflicting, information leave you? It means that when you start to use cooperative learning you will have to experiment with the way you form the groups and see what works best for your learners. Shimazoe and Aldrich (2010) provide some additional advice on this issue. However you form the groups, it is important that ‘students do not see or feel themselves as being penalized academically by being in the group they are in’ (Stahl, 1997:8).

Group size

Cooperative learning groups can vary in size from two to 10 or more, but there are advantages in limiting the size to four or five. Cottell and Millis (1994) suggest that groups of four (sometimes called quads) have several specific advantages:

· Quads are small enough to encourage all group members to remain attentive and focused on the learning task.

· Quads are large enough to function smoothly when a team member is occasionally absent.

· Quads lend themselves well to pair work – pairs within each team can work cooperatively to develop ideas that are then refined by the quad.

· If the class does not divide evenly into quads, a fifth member can be added to several teams without making them too large.

Effective group size may depend on the age of the students and their experience in working cooperatively. Although Chambers (1993) found that Kindergarten children were capable of learning cooperatively, Abrami and Chambers (1996) suggested that their limited ability to take others’ perspectives into account may limit their ability to work cooperatively in groups of more than two or three. At the other end of the age scale, adults can sometimes work effectively in large cooperative groups because they are more aware of using rules or procedures to control how learners interact in the group. Ladyshewsky and Gardner (2008) make the interesting point that large groups can be more effective than small groups when the student collaboration is taking place online.

Apart from group size, you will need to consider how long to keep the learners in the same group. You might bring teams together and disperse them within a single class period, or keep them together until some specific task has been completed, or have them remain together for an extended period. My personal experience has been that cooperative groups function better if their membership is stable for a reasonable time (such as a full school term).

Guidelines for learners

The minimum guidance you will need to give students if you want them to work cooperatively is:

· a well-defined task with clear outcomes

· suggestions of how they might get started

· self-checking guidelines so that they can monitor their progress and know when their task is complete

· guidelines about participation and some practice in working collaboratively (active and tolerant listening, helping others to understand difficult points, giving and receiving constructive criticism, managing disagreements)

· guidelines for asking thought-provoking questions that will generate high-level thinking

· suggestions for how the group might develop a plan of action – who will be doing what, when and for what purpose

· Suggestions for how to deal with group members who are not doing their fair share of work – this is particularly important if students will remain in the same group for several lessons, or if the groups are expected to continue their cooperative work outside the classroom.

Reading for questions 2

Cooperative learning is particularly useful for the following reasons:

· Having students work together results in much more learning than occurs when students work alone, competitively or individually (according to evidence from more than 600 research studies reported in Johnson & Johnson, 1986). By encouraging students to explore and discuss their understandings, cooperative learning helps students to develop a deep understanding of course content.

· Students who engage in regular cooperative learning tend to like school better, like one another better and develop better social skills (Aronson, 2012; Johnson & Johnson, 2010).

· Cooperative learning teaches students to be less reliant on the teacher and more reliant on their own ability to think, to seek information from other sources and to learn from other students. They become empowered to take greater responsibility for their own learning and for the learning of others (Drake & Mucci, 1993). This shared responsibility for learning can enhance learner satisfaction, and if cooperative skills are taught explicitly they can be transferred to new learning contexts (Patrick, 1994).

· Cooperative learning helps students to learn respect for one another’s strengths and limitations and to accept these differences. This is very important in culturally diverse classrooms and in classrooms that include students with disabilities. Because it fosters positive interdependence among students, it can promote cross-racial and cross-cultural friendships. Aronson (2012) describes how these benefits were the catalyst that led him to develop the Jigsaw approach to cooperative learning. Manning and Lucking (1993:13) point out that ‘the recognition, acceptance, and appreciation of learner differences required for successful cooperative learning are the same attitudes that are needed for positive intercultural relationships’. However, substantial periods of time are required to change or eliminate biased attitudes.

· Cooperative learning provides opportunities for learners to see that their individual differences in abilities, backgrounds, cultures and experiences are valued and respected, and can be accommodated in learning tasks and contexts. This enhances both motivation and achievement and can help to create a general atmosphere of compassion, respect and inclusion (Aronson, 2000).

· Cooperative learning helps students to understand that different points of view need not be divisive – they can be a positive aspect of developing an understanding of a subject. This can lead to students asking more and better questions in class.

· Cooperative tasks are useful in promoting a sense of responsibility to others and a willingness to reflect on outcomes (Curriculum Corporation, 2002).

· Cooperative learning can boost students’ confidence and self-esteem because it allows all students (not just the high achievers) to experience learning success. In some studies this effect is related to group size (Bertucci, Conte, Johnson & Johnson, 2010).

· Cooperative learning can change students’ views about learning. It helps them to move from seeing learning as individual memorisation of facts to seeing it as a collective construction of understanding.

· Cooperative learning encourages students to verbalise their ideas and to compare them with the ideas and feelings of other students. This can be particularly useful when the students are solving problems because it helps them to see that there can be multiple solutions to complex problems, and this helps to improve their problem-solving skills.

· Cooperative learning encourages students to think about their learning processes, identify the limitations of their knowledge and learn to seek help when necessary. It encourages students to reflect on what they think about each aspect of the task and to consider (and verbalise) how they arrived at those thoughts. Recent neurological research (Willis, 2006) suggests that these factors all contribute positively to learning.

· Cooperative learning emphasises democratic thought and practice as desirable ways for people to interact (whatever the focus of their interactions).

· Cooperative learning can change the verbal interaction patterns of students, so that they make greater use of specific verbal patterns believed to be related to increased learning, such as statements of support and requests for help (Lonning, 1993). It can also help them to develop effective strategies for what Wegerif and Scrimshaw (1997) refer to as exploratory talk, in which students engage critically but constructively with one another’s ideas and are able to alternate between taking the perspective of another group member and critically assessing that perspective.

· Cooperative learning provides students with opportunities to test their ideas and understandings and to receive feedback in a relatively safe and nonthreatening environment. Students who might otherwise feel stressed by participating in whole-class discussions (e.g. underachievers, students with disabilities and students whose first language is not the language of instruction) can learn in a more relaxed atmosphere. Students can practise problem solving in a low-risk environment because it is much less threatening to make a mistake in front of two or three peers than in front of a whole class.

· Cooperative learning can help students to see that their perceived lack of talent for a particular subject is actually a problem of lack of thorough understanding of the material (Manera & Glockhamer, 1988–89).

· When compared with lecture and discussion activities, cooperative learning can lead to students being frustrated less often, getting confused less often, feeling more intellectually challenged, feeling more actively involved in learning and looking forward to class more often (Glass & Putman, 1988–89).

· Numerous studies have found that cooperative learning can be equally beneficial for high, average and low achievers (but for different reasons). Cooperative learning encourages weaker students to persist and helps strong students to identify gaps in their understanding (Felder & Brent, 1994).

· Cooperative learning can help students to become socially integrated into networks of positive peer relationships that assist them with constructive conflict resolution and this can lead to reductions in antisocial behaviour such as bullying (Aronson, 2000; Johnson, Johnson & Holubec, 2008). In turn, this can lead to improved academic performance (Johnson, Johnson & Roseth, 2010).

· There are some claims that providing frequent cooperative learning experiences may be an important tool to increase students’ cooperativeness and thereby reduce the frequency of aggression, increase the frequency of prosocial behaviours and reduce students’ individualistic predispositions (Choi, Johnson & Johnson, 2011).

· Cooperative learning appears to be an effective way of helping students to develop the core skills they will need in the future: the ability to research, think creatively and collaboratively problem solve

You cannot expect these benefits to occur rapidly. Stahl (1997) claims that the benefits related to affective social skills and attitudes may not emerge until students have been engaged successfully in cooperative learning for four or more weeks. A range of other issues and challenges that teachers face when attempting to use cooperative learning strategies are described by Gillies, Ashman and Terwel (2008).

Most research on cooperative learning has focused on its benefits for students, but a few studies have considered how it can directly benefit teachers. Garvie (1994) found that teachers who use cooperative learning are likely to be more enthusiastic about teaching than those who do not use it. Shachar and Shmuelevitz (1997:65) found that ‘teachers who employed cooperative learning in their classrooms expressed a significantly greater degree of efficacy in promoting the learning of slow students compared with teachers who … did not employ cooperative learning in their classrooms at all’. Many of the benefits to teachers are a direct result of the increased motivation of learners.

Note : you can use the references from here and say seen at Killen 2013 and I don’t need you to make a reference list