MAKING COOPERATIVE LEARNING WORK FOR YOU * There are many resources available to help you learn more about strategies for cooperative learning; choose one to keep it simple!

PIES  Positive Interdependence  Individual Accountability  Equal Participation  Simultaneous Interaction

When Cooperative Learning Goes Wrong…  Don’t mark a group product.  Maintain a focus on the group product as the learning part of the lesson.  Provide an individual form of assessment on the same type of task or expectation following the group time working together.  Use heterogeneous groupings or, for some tasks, random groupings.

Good Ways to Keep Cooperative Learning Working for You…  Provide role cards so that everyone has a clearly defined task.  Keep track of who is in which roles, so the more desirable roles ( and the less desirable ones) get rotated among students.  Attach some part of the “puzzle” of the day’s learning to some token piece of equipment if possible (e.g., the calculator, the dice, the deck of cards, etc.)

Creating Positive Interdependence  This is probably the most important and the most difficult part of cooperative learning to plan.  Why? Because you need to plan it so that capable students don’t feel held back and less capable ones don’t feel “bulldozed”.  Do this by providing some form of non-mark recognition to every team that completes the task so that all team members know the skill or content.

Individual Accountability  Plan a group task but individual assessment of the knowledge or skill that is your focus.  Never give a group mark!  Be sure that students know what the individual assessment will be before they start the group task…it will help to motivate their involvement.

Equal Participation  The way you plan for positive interdependence can support equal participation.  Be sure that you have arranged the physical space so that students can work together comfortably.  Reward the type of interaction you want to see ( e.g., heads together, bottoms in the air) by praising it and showing other teams what it looks like and sounds like.  Focus on teaching and/or reinforcing one social skill per cooperative activity; use T-charts to anchor the skill; praise its use!

T-Chart Anchors Skill: Disagreeing in an agreeable way…  LOOKS LIKE  SOUNDS LIKE

SIMULTANEOUS INTERACTION  Provide enough time for productive discussion to take place; remember that discussion is part of working together.  Praise on-task discussions; debrief with examples of what you heard and saw that was positive.  Structure time for each group to identify what they did well and where they should focus goals for improvement.

SOME SOCIAL SKILLS YOU WILL NEED TO TEACH…  Active listening  Taking turns  Sharing materials  Respecting the ideas and rights of others  Not making or receiving put-downs  Never laughing at others’ mistakes  Making decisions  Solving problems  Praising others  Disagreeing in an agreeable way  Resolving conflict  Reaching consensus Creating the Dynamic Classroom, p.34

Kagan “Smart Card”  Kagan identifies 56 strategies and briefly explains each; you will develop new strategies as you work with this approach  Some are team building ideas; some can be applied to content.  Keep the strategies simple, and focused on everyone learning the content or skill.

THINK BIG…. But start small!