Cooperative Learning

5 Pages 1241 Words

Cooperative learning is one of the most popular instructional strategies used in education. There are five defining elements of cooperative learning:
 Positive interdependence- a sense of sink or swim together.
 Face-to-face promotive interaction- helping each other learn and applauding success and efforts.
 Individual and group accountability- each of us has to contribute to the group achieving its goals.
 Interpersonal and small group skills- communication, trust, leadership, decision-making, and conflict resolution.
 Group processing- reflecting on how well the team is functioning and how to function even better.

When organizing students into cooperative learning groups it has a
strong effect on learning, even if the groups don't compete among each other. Three generalizations can be used to guide the use of cooperative learning.
1. Organizing groups based on their ability levels should be done sparingly. When grouping students they benefit the most when they are grouped with homogeneously. That is with the exception of low ability students they perform better when they are grouped heterogeneously.
2. Cooperative groups should be kept rather small in size to be more effective.
3. Cooperative learning should be applied consistently and systematically, but not overused. It is reported that grouping strategies are most effective when they are used at least once a week. It can often be misused when the tasks are not well structured or overused when students are not given time to master the skills and processes independently first.

There are three ways to vary the grouping patterns within your
classroom. One way is informal grouping such as pair sharing or turn to your neighbor that may only occur for a short period of time. Formal groups are more designed to give students enough time to complete a complex task. The last way is to use base groups, which are long term groups su...