Cooperative Learning

I have always had positive thoughts about Cooperative Learning because I support any method of teaching that does not involve students sitting in a lecture.  I believe that Cooperative Learning is as close as you can get to replicating the work environment.  Students need to learn to work collaboratively as they would in their future workplace.

 As much as I enjoy Cooperative Learning, I do believe this method has barriers.  I feel that some student personality types will not work well with this system.  Some will want to “run the show” while others will be content to sit back and let others finish their work for them.  The in instructor can prevent any Cooperative Learning disasters by clearly stating the rules and expectations before the lesson.  Specific roles should be assigned to each student.  A grading rubric will also help the students to understand their roles in the Cooperative Learning and the teacher’s expectations.

Another problem mentioned in one of the articles is that the high achieving students’ performance diminished because of such activities.  Perhaps the instructor can help prevent this from happening by giving such students more control over decisions or more responsibility.

I used Cooperative Learning the most in my elementary school general music student teaching days.  I have even used Cooperative Learning to teach concepts to grumpy, middle-aged army bandspersons.  I once had to find a way to teach map reading to a band.  This is something that is an army requirement, but we don’t do it in our job every day.   There is little motivation when you aren’t actually graded on the material.   I decided to present the information and break into five groups to construct a map with all the army symbols.  To my amazement, even the most cynical of my peers seemed to be engaged in the training.   I will definitely use Cooperative Learning again in the future.

I can see cooperative learning being best used in the online environment.  Students could collaborate to create a website or Wikispace with information.  They could use the jigsaw method where each student does research on a topic and posts their portion of the information.   This method could be challenging to use online because most online students seem to be busy professionals.  They could be in different time zones or work different shifts so “getting together” online could be a challenge.