One for all and all for one!
- Nov 20, 2017
- 2 min read
Today’s class we have been talking about Cooperative Learning. It is an instructional strategy in which small groups of students work together on a common task. Everyone has responsibilities and is held accountable for aiding in the completion of the assignment. In addition, to learn from each other, students also learn how to work as part of a team. To guarantee a successful learning, there must be some basic elements:
Positive interdependence: Students feel responsible for their own and the group effort.
Face-to-face interaction: Pupils encourage one another.
Individual and group accountability: Each student is responsible for their part and the group is accountable for meeting its goal.
Teachers must be guiding the activities, helping students, solving doubts and finally assessing.
Furthermore, there are many benefits that can result from using cooperative learning strategies.
With cooperative learning, students feel more motivated and enjoy it.
Cooperative learning is interactive, so students are active participants in the learning process.
Cooperative learning promotes critical thinking.
Cooperative learning requires students to learn to work together.
It is also important to note that every student has their own personality and their own attributes so we, as teachers, must create heterogeneous groups and assign roles to all members so that they work altogether. In each group, there must be at least a checker, a coordinator and a speaker so that the classroom would be a place to collaborate.
At the class, we watched two different videos as an example of this way of learning: one from the film “A Beautiful Mind” and the other from one chapter of “Big Bang Theory”. Then we made a debate about these two videos and which one was a better example of cooperative learning. We used the tool Padlet which allowed us to see our classmate’s opinions about the videos in real time and answer them as well. Our teachers also gave us a number of useful activities that we can implement in our future class related to cooperative learning:
Round Robin: Each student, in turn, writes 1 answer/idea as a paper is passed around the group.
Poster: Students collaborate to create a poster with words and images that reflect their learning.
Think-Pair-Share: Teacher assigns a prompt. Each student thinks about the prompt on their own. Then, each student pairs up with another student and share their thoughts about the prompt.
Travelers and Tellers: Students in a cooperative group learn about a specified topic, then half or less of the group stays to tell what they learned while the others travel to other groups to earn other material. When the travelers return they share with the tellers what they learned on their travels.
Last but not least, I cannot finish this post without congratulating my ICTs teachers Marcos and Michael for winning the IV Edition of Most Innovative Teachers Awards with the project “8 REASONS WHY”. Congratulations!!
See you next week!
Isabel
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