Cooperative learning

Hello everyone I hope you enjoy reading this :)

On July 15, 1982, Don Bennett, a Seattle businessman, became the first amputee ever to climb Mount Rainier (reported in Kouzes and Posner 1987). He climbed 14,410 feet on one leg and two crutches. It took him five days. When asked to state the most important lesson he learned from doing the climb, Bennett said without hesitation, “You can't do it alone.”

The lesson learned by Bennett is one that we should all take to heart. If classrooms and schools are to become places where people achieve worthy goals, they must become places where students, teachers, adminstrators, and other staff cooperate in pursuit of those goals. Such cooperation must be consciously implemented until it becomes a natural way of acting and interacting. And it must take place at all levels of schooling from the classroom to the school to the district.

Cooperation in the Classroom

In every classroom, no matter what the subject area, teachers can structure lessons so that students:

1. Engage in a win-lose struggle to see who is best (competition);
2. Work independently on their own learning goals at their own pace and in their own space to achieve a preset criterion of excellence (individualism); or
3. Work cooperatively in small groups, ensuring that all members master the assigned material (cooperation).

Cooperation means working together to accomplish shared goals. Within cooperative activities individuals seek outcomes that are beneficial to themselves and beneficial to all other group members. Cooperative learning is the instructional use of small groups that allows students to work together to maximize their own and each other's learning. The idea is simple. Class members are split into small groups after receiving instruction from the teacher. They then work through the assignment until all group members have successfully understood and completed it.

 Cooperative efforts result in students striving for mutual benefit so that all group members benefit from each other's efforts (Your success benefits me and my success benefits you.); recognizing that all group members share a common fate (We all sink or swim together here.); knowing that one's performance is mutually caused by oneself and one's colleagues (We can't do it without you.); and feeling proud and jointly celebrating when a group member is recognized for achievement (You got an A! That's terrific!). In cooperative learning situations, there is a positive interdependence among students' goal attainments; students perceive that they can reach their learning goals if and only if the other students in the learning group also reach their goals

In the ideal classroom, all students would learn how to work collaboratively with others, compete for fun and enjoyment, and work autonomously on their own. Teachers must decide which goal structure to implement within each lesson.

Quote of the day : ''Together we stand, divided we fall.''