FIRST PROJECT PRESENTATION "Cooperative Learning"

Why to work cooperatively?

• We learn better from each other.
• Teams are more effective when you are in a complex project.
• You will reinforce your interpersonal skills.
• You will also develop your interdependence and your self esteem.
• You will be able to apply all you have learnt in your daily life and personal relationships.

COOPERATIVE LEARNING

COOPERATIVE LEARNING

Introduction

The learning system has always been a competitive environment, as we can see in the picture. Each student, individually, had to memorize the concepts explained by the teacher and on the textbooks as best as they could to achieve a mark that defines how much the student has approach to the model student, the standard. It seems as if students were a manufacture and the school was a fabric. So, those students that are not like the standard are thrown away from schools. This learning process differentiates people as academic and non-academic.

However, there is another methodology, that is cooperative learning, that instead of looking for the standardization of the students, adapts the curriculum to each student to develop their abilities. Students are active rather than passive, the opposite of traditional learning methodologies. On this methodology, students do not learn individually. It is an inclusive education where they work together and improve as a whole. So, none of the students remine isolated or drop out.

There are some factors that conditionate students learning and are needed to make the change between competitive and cooperative learning. These are: the role of the teacher, the class distribution, the engagement between the students and the rules sets by the teacher and the students.

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As we have done at the beginning this teacher encourages learning and positive relationships, which we think as a group is vital to work cooperatively.

What is cooperative learning?

Cooperative learning is a learning methodology, in which team work groups are the base of the students learning development. It motivates students to become self-directed in their learning. All the students work in group to reach a common goal. They work together encouraging their interdependence (trust), interactivity (communication), accountability (responsibility) or collaborative skills (leader-ship). During the process, all the team members are learning about the topic, since the group members make sure everyone understand the topic.

We, “Los Gochos” team, have defined cooperative learning as group works where students cooperate to achieve certain objectives under some specific conditions.

Classroom Organization

The class must be organized in an environment where all the students can see each other, they can move with freedom around the class to motivate their interaction and communication with their classmates. They can be organized in base structure (like in spike-espiga-) or in expert structure

Group Organization

Base groups: they are permanent and the teacher is the one who organizes it in a heterogeneous way of: Gender, abilities, motivation, hobbies and ethnicity also the suitable number of members is around 3-4 but no more of 6. Finally, this group structure should rest over the course. Ex org e inst groups

Sporadic groups: they can be organized in an heterogeneous or a homogeneous way, they can be composed from 2 to 8 students and they normally last only one session Ex. development psychology groups

Expert groups: base groups are redistributed in different groups to get better in a specific competence. Then the members come back to their base groups and they share the knowledge acquire. Ex communication groups of the topic teachers are afraid of ICT

Internal group organization

Team notebooks: in it students elaborate some files where are reflected the members of the group, their role which should be exchanged or the team objectives in order to reflect on their performance so the group get better in it functioning.

Session diaries: in it the responsible of writing the diary with the rest of the members reflect about what they have done and how acquiring a critique attitude about their personal performance and the group one.

Teacher’s role

Teacher have to explain their students the learning objectives they want them to achieve with the task, as well as organize the class groups in an heterogeneous way. Communicate to the learners they have a common goal and to achieve it they have to work cooperatively, in this process teachers must follow that their students and the group works are going to succeed in their task. To do it effectively teachers have to guide their learners, help them if they are struggle, ensure everyone participates in the group development and motivate continually students in their learning process.

Cooperative learning techniques

Team Assisted Individualization: each member’s work are adjusted to their characteristics and necessities. Students help each other in order to reach the team objectives.

Peer tutoring: this technique consists on a duality of the members of the group in which one of them (the tutor) helps the other one to understand a topic but not giving him the solution, only guiding him to find the answer.

Jigsaw: this technique is based on the expert group organization because each member of the team is responsible to prepare a topic and specialise in it with the rest of the mates who share the same topic. After that, they go back to their base teams to work in a common project understood by all of them.

Group-investigation: students choose a topic depending on their likes and abilities. Later they form groups of 3 to 5 members and with the help of the teacher, they design the objectives in order to prepare a project which has to be evaluated by the teacher and the students.

IDEAS FROM THE READING: COOPERATIVE LEARNING

According to the Johnson & Johnson model, cooperative learning is instruction that involves students working in teams to accomplish a common goal, that maximizes the learning and satisfaction, that result from working on a high-performance team, under conditions that include the following elements:

1. Positive interdependence. Team members are obliged to rely on one another to achieve the goal. If any team members fail to do their part, everyone suffers consequences.

2. Individual accountability. All students in a group are held accountable for doing their share of the work and for mastery of all of the material to be learned.

3. Face-to-face promotive interaction. Although some of the group work may be parcelled out and done individually, some must be done interactively, with group members providing one another with feedback, challenging reasoning and conclusions, and perhaps most importantly, teaching and encouraging one another.

4. Appropriate use of collaborative skills. Students are encouraged and helped to develop and practice trust-building, leadership, decision-making, communication, and conflict management skills

5. Group processing. Team members set group goals, periodically assess what they are doing well as a team, and identify changes they will make to function more effectively in the future.

However, instructors who attempt it frequently encounter resistance and sometimes open hostility from the students.

Examples from cooperative learning:

Problem solving: in these tasks it would be recommendable that children solve the problems individually at home and after that, they join and compare their answers and help each others because if they solve them at the same time some children would be faster than others.

It is a good idea to make a test after each project with the objective that every children work actively and all of them understand the task in order to understand the topic better. That way every student know every part of their project and not only their own part.

Students will evaluate their own classmates giving them a feedback of the project and from those recommendations the evaluated group would give a paper to the teacher including their mates’ comments. Using rubrics is useful but these need to be shown to the students firstly so they know what it is expected from them.

In peer-led team learning (PLTL), lectures are supplemented by weekly 2-hour workshops in which students work in six- to eight-person groups to solve structured problems under the guidance of trained peer leaders.

Students worked in teams of three or four on activities that involved guided discovery, critical thinking questions that help provide the guidance, solving context-rich and sometimes open-ended and incompletely defined

problems, and metacognitive reflecting. Most activities focused on a single concept or issue and could be completed in a 55-minute session. Following each workshop, students completed an individual quiz on the workshop content, thus promoting individual accountability

Individual student performance was superior when cooperative methods were used as compared

with competitive or individualistic methods. The performance outcomes measured include

knowledge acquisition, retention, accuracy, creativity in problem solving, and higher-level

reasoning. Other studies show that cooperative learning is superior for promoting metacognitive through, persistence in working toward a goal, transfer of learning from one setting to another,

time on task, and intrinsic motivation. better social skills and higher self-esteem (3), as well as more positive attitudes about their educational experience, the subject area, and the college.

Students usually have rejection behaviours towards cooperative learning and for that reason teachers shouldn't use all the techniques at a time but focus on only one to make the pupils feel comfortable and introduce new ones slowly.  

Groups are formed by the teacher in an heterogeneous way:

• 3-4 members in each group
• Living in different places
• From different countries

Groups are made by a previous questionnaire.

It is important that each member has its role but all members need to understand the other's work and that is the role of one of them.

The members of the group should evaluate themselves and the rest with the objective to improve.

For a correct development groups should stay the same for about a month. Provide for periodic self-assessment of team functioning. Every 2–4 weeks, teams have to respond to questions

such as: How well are we meeting our goals and expectations? What are we doing well? What needs improvement? What (if anything) will we do differently next time? Ayudarles en la resolución de conflictos

At the beginning of the course, explain to students what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and what’s in it for them. Let them know what they’ll be doing in teams, what procedures you’ll follow, and what your expectations are. Then tell them why you’re doing it, perhaps noting that it will help prepare them for the type of environment most of them will experience as professionals, and sharing some of the research results (particularly those relating to higher grades). The section in this chapter on research support for cooperative learning provides useful material of this nature.

What are the main functions of the teacher in this  kind of learning?

1. To specify the learning and teaching objectives from cooperative learning by choosing the correct technique and the strategies. This implies that the teacher dedicates one or more sessions to what we could call “initiation activities” presenting the topic to the students and giving them information.
2. To choosing the right size of the teams in an heterogeneous way.
3. To dispose the classroom in a way that the members of each group are together looking at each other and also see the teacher and the blackboard.
4. To provide the class with the materials needed and suggestions to do their work.
5. To explain the students what they have to do and the structure they have to follow.
6. To explain the objectives that the teacher wants the pupils to achieve and to connect concepts and information. To define the main concepts, explain the procedure students must follow and give them examples to understand the topic better but also give questions to the class to check what students know.
7. To structure positive goals interdependence: tell the students that they need to reach a goal as a team by working cooperatively with their responsibilities.
8. To observe interactions between students. The purpose of this observation is to know the problems of cooperative learning and to check that students are open to different ideas. Every member must give solutions and express their personal opinions but any member should have the role of a leader. The teacher can interpose himself giving comments and suggestions.

 PRESENTATION