Cooperative Learning

Collaboration is essential in so many careers, especially in science, and I believe that it is our obligation as teachers to help students build the cooperative skills necessary to be successful both inside and outside the classroom. Therefore, I believe that cooperative learning should be a major component to the science (and all other content areas) curriculum.

During my student teaching experience, I tried to incorporate cooperative learning as often as possible. Although students were always excited for the opportunity to work in groups, the outcome was not always want I intended. Despite trying a variety of ways of forming groups (heterogenous, mastery, mixed level, random, and student choice), a variety of group sizes (from 2-4), and using a variety of different learning tasks, I found it difficult to get all of the students to "buy into" the goal of cooperative tasks and invest in the group. I often observed that all of the students completed the work, but they hadn't worked together to do so; students were not actually "collaborating." I finished student teaching without being able to resolve this issue and without a method to implement to try to fix the problem.

Monday night's discussion on cooperative learning finally provided me with some tools to try moving forward.. Of particular interest and help was the material presented by Johnson, Johnson, and Holubec on types of interdependence and basic elements of cooperative teams. In looking over and discussing this material, I noticed that I had defecits in two major areas during my student teaching experience: creating interdepence and providing explicit instruction in cooperative skills. Students were always aware of the individual need to complete the taskand that they needed to work in groups because of limited resources  ort time, but in reflecting back, I don't think I ever created true interdepence (I feel totally disappointed in myself that I never realized this! I think I was worried about so many other things that I just didn't notice). There were a few times where I feel I created a little interdependence, but not enough. For example, students were assigned to complete a group fetal pig dissection lab as the cullumating activity to the human physiology unit. Prior to starting the lab, I passed out a dissection questionaire to find out which students really wanted to be hands-on with the dissection and which wanted to be observers. I then organized groups based on the questionaire responses and skill level. Before beginning the first day of dissection, students were told to choose a lead dissector, assistant dissector and readers/recorders. For each student to successfully complete the lab, each student had to perform a role. However, in walking around, I noticed that there were some groups were only one person was dissecting and one person was reading/recording and the other two group members were off task. I think I was close to creating interdepence in this case but I could have further developed it by enforcing each persons role before they could begin.

The other area that I feel I did not address was cooperative skills. I think group work would have been significantly improved if I took 5 minutes before cooperative activities to discuss cooperative skills or to do a looks like, sounds like T-chart that our professor has spoken about. However, I felt that too much was packed into everyday, that I barely had time to get the students through the activities, let alone taken 5 more minutes to discuss this (another topic for another day). However, I believe having this discussion occassionally would significantly improve the students work efficiency and quality.

After Monday night's discussion, I am really excited to get into the field and try out some of these new cooperative learning techiniques!