Cooperative Learning!

I’m embarrassed to write that out of the twelve strategies listed, I only marked an “s” next to four. My strengths, as far as cooperative learning, are that I offer CL experiences to students in honors classes, I plan open-ended tasks so that all students can make a contribution, I use flexible CL groups so that students can accomplish large tasks through the efforts of smaller specialty groups and I provide a safety net for students who do not want to work in groups.

I justified marking an “s” next to those strategies for a few reasons. First, I have assigned group work to all class levels from highest to lowest. Also, my group work assignments are usually pretty open-ended. For instance, when I teach English II, we read a bunch of stories from several cultures about how the world was created. After we read them, I put the kids into groups and assign them the task of creating some kind of product (a play, a song, a storybook, an epic poem, etc.) that tells the group’s version of how the world came to be here. With this and most other CL assignments, I allow students to work on their own if they would prefer, however they do have the option of “bouncing ideas off of” nearby groups if need be.

Unfortunately, my weaknesses far outweigh my CL strengths. In an effort to make excuses for myself, I feel that I should explain that there is no prerequisite or requirement that students have to meet in order to be in an honors class at my school. So, I cannot assume that every kid in my honors class is gifted (or even a small fraction of them) and, therefore, I cannot do special gifted-kid group work with them.

I do like some of the strategies listed in the text and need to figure out a way to incorporate them. I like the idea of differentiating tasks for different ability levels. I usually require groups to present their final products to the class, so I could give each group a slightly different task and not let on that they are of different levels of difficulty. I also really need to quit giving one grade to an entire group based on the group’s final product according to this list, however, I do not think this is always a bad thing especially if I’m constantly in motion making sure that each member is participating.

A few of these strategies would be simply impossible for me, like creating groups of kids from different grade levels (I only teach 11^th graders) and using technology to form virtual CL groups. While I think it would be really great for my students to be able to work with other students from all over the world, we simply do not have access to computers for the amount of time that a project like this would require. Lame.

Overall, I think that cooperative learning gets a bad rap because of all the teachers who just throw kids into groups willy-nilly and then sit at their desks and grade papers while the quiet kid in each group does the work for everybody. CL is a useful tool for students and teachers if done correctly.