Cooperative Learning

Cooperative Learning by Julien Coci

Cooperative learning is an approach to organizing classroom activities into academic and social learning experiences. Students must work in groups to complete tasks collectively toward academic goals. Everyone succeeds when the group succeeds. Ross and Smyth (1995) describe successful cooperative learning tasks as intellectually demanding, creative, open-ended, and involve higher order thinking tasks.

Students must fully participate and put forth effort within their group

Each group member has a task/role/responsibility therefore must believe that they are responsible for their learning and that of their group

Face-to-face promotive interaction

Members promote each other’s success

Students explain to one another what they have or are learning and assist one another with understanding and completion of assignments

Individual and group accountability

Each student must demonstrate mastery of the content being studied

Each student is accountable for their learning and work, therefore eliminating work avoidance

Social skills

Social skills that must be taught in order for successful cooperative learning to occur

Skills include effective communication, interpersonal and group skills

Leadership

Decision-making

Trust-building

Communication

Conflict-management skills

Group processing

Every so often groups must assess their effectiveness and decide how it can be improved

In order for student achievement to improve considerably, two characteristics must be present

When designing cooperative learning tasks and reward structures, individual responsibility and accountability must be identified. Individuals must know exactly what their responsibilities are and that they are accountable to the group in order to reach their goal.

All group members must be involved in order for the group to complete the task. In order for this to occur each member must have a task that they are responsible for which cannot be completed by any other group member.

Cooperative Learning is embedded in every learning experience in my classroom. These instructional strategies are successful in increasing student engagement, participation as well as driving individual student responsibility, accountability and ownership of their learning. Encouraging them to be reflective and creative learners; by building interpersonal skills as well as developing important social dynamics in our cohort. Furthermore cooperative learning has had positive impact upon nurturing the education of all my students raising the achievement standards of all children in my class and ultimately fostering a culture of “a love of learning” in Hovea 10.