Information Age Education

The Elements and Essence of Cooperative Learning

January 12th, 2007

Our students are the Millennials, and they are a generation that value collaboration. Cooperative learning has been around for a while, yet few teachers have actually had it modeled for them or know the components of what make cooperative learning groups successful.

Most teachers mistakenly believe, as did I, that when kids work in groups this is cooperative learning. However, many of us wonder where the cooperative part is happening because kids may be sitting together but one person does everything. Cooperation is the essence of working in teams. This needs to be modeled and supported.

Do you know the five elements of cooperative learning? If not, chances are your group work may be hit or miss in its effectiveness. Here are some things to consider when using cooperative learning:

Positive Classroom Environment
It’s important to build a safe classroom environment. This can be done by:

setting classroom norms
doing class building activities (See “Tribes” for ideas)
explicitly teaching cooperative skills, such as how to disagree politely, and focusing on that skill for a few class periods
requiring the students to check in with each other before asking the teacher for help; all students in the group should know the question that is being asked. When you go to a group, if Maria is raising her hand, ask Josh, “What’s Maria’s question?”

Group Students Heterogeneously
Students learn cooperative skills better when they have to work with a wide range of people. There are times when homogeneous grouping is appropriate, but this tends to be the exception.

Positive Interdependence
Activities need to be structured so that what helps one group member helps everyone. The activities have to be structured to promote collaboration. Some activities that naturally do this are jigsaws and think-pair-share (See links above).

Individual Accountability
Every student has a role and is accountable for work. This can be accomplished by students labeling what part of the group project they contributed to or by having an individual assessment on the information after the group work.

Don’t give up!
Keep experimenting and reflecting on the activities you did with your students. What worked? What didn’t? Why? Starting to use cooperative learning strategies can be a bit unnerving at first because we give up the authoritarian teacher role, but the rewards are immense. Our kids deserve it, and we’re modeling perseverance too!

For more ideas, strategies and resources on cooperative learning check out my Educating Millennials website.

Resources You Can Use

I also highly recommend Teacher’s Resource for Cooperative Learning: Practical Techniques, Basic Principles and Frequently Asked Questions by my former professor Dr. George Jacobs. It really helped me to identify what I needed to do to have more effective cooperative learning activities. Click on the book cover to purchase this helpful resource.
$Teacher\'s Sourcebook for Cooperative Learning: Practical Techniques, Basic Principles, and Frequently Asked Questions$

If you find the information on this blog helpful and are interested in any of the resources I’ve highlighted here, I’d be grateful if you purchased them through the links on my blog as I earn a small a percentage from each sale. Thanks.