The cafe was warm, and soft morning sunlight streamed in through the tinted windows and onto Maria’s piles of newspaper clippings and scribbled-on napkins. Despite the fact that bringing them here made the cafe’s other patrons suspect she was a serial killer or something, there was no doubt in Maria’s mind that this spot was the best possible place to get work done. Everything about it made her feel comfortable and awake: the low rabble of patrons ordering in the background, the ever-so-slightly misshapen mahogany furniture, the same hipster album that was constantly playing on repeat… There wasn’t a single thing about this place that she didn’t adore.
Suddenly, Maria heard the doorbell’s ring, followed immediately by the familiar clack of Ashley’s confident high-heeled footsteps approaching her. Maria cleared her papers away from a nearby spot and waved at her best friend, beckoning her to approach. Ashley ordered her usual and sat down, wasting no time with small talk before the two got down to business, like they had in this very spot so many times before.
“So” She said, grabbing a nearby napkin shard. “Last night I was thinking about that potential plot thread with Galagixx, that evil wizard from the Belt of Nothing? What if he had been talking to the monster from the pit the whole time? Like, why don’t we make him…” Maria listened to her friend intently. She loved the way Ashley lit up when the two talked about their little project. When the two ex-roommates had decided to catch up at this cafe two years ago, neither of them could have ever imagined that they’d be meeting here weekly to discuss the inner workings of the greatest fantasy novel ever written.
There was no time in Maria’s life where she had felt quite the same as she did when she was in this cafe with Ashley. The two of them would bounce ideas off of one another, frantically Googling concepts and scribbling plot threads and rough sketches on napkins as people who know nothing about fantasy writing judged them from afar. She and Ashley had created an entire world together, and the euphoria of doing so with someone who cared about the project just as much as she did was the best thing Maria had felt in her entire life.
Ashley excitedly clicked open her pen as she finished her tangent, reaching for the hundredth blank napkin from the table’s dispenser. Maria waited with baited breath for her turn to speak. She had just thought of a real game-changer…
Humans truly are social creatures. Our society, our lives, and every aspect of our psychology are all built around the people near us and our relationships with them. Being able to work and cooperate with your coworkers and superiors is one of the most important skills that a person can possess, so why is it that school is designed to be such an individual effort?
Think about it. In school, you’d get yelled at for talking during a lecture, passing notes would get you detention, and cheating on an exam was the ultimate sin any student could commit. Even in the event that your teacher would assign a “group project”, more often than not, you just ended up getting randomly paired with a bunch of kids you don’t like and dividing the work up between the group without actually collaborating at all. It seems like everybody has a horror story regarding group projects like this one.
So, the evidence would suggest that doing everything individually isn’t a great way to get kids excited about learning and prepared for the world, and group projects aren’t really cutting it either, so what do we as educators do to get those creative juices flowing and to get students excited and passionate about their learning process? It would turn out that there are a number of solutions in the form of cooperative learning techniques.
STAD/SCALE UP
Scale-up is a minor adjustment to the classic “lecture-style” classroom that can go a long way. With this cooperative learning style, students sit in groups and work as a team to answer a number of questions, often on whiteboards, periodically strewn throughout the lecture and demonstrations. Students are evaluated with individual quizzes and exams. STAD specifically focuses on recording each student’s progress and praising them for both their total performance and their improvement from previous times in the semester. The big strength of scale-up is that it allows students to work together on solving problems and answering each other’s questions. This gives students some great opportunities to explain material covered to one another and really nail down those concepts.
Jigsaw II
The philosophy of Jigsaw learning is “divide and conquer”. The class gets broken up into groups, with each group being given a fraction of the lesson’s content. The groups then go off to study their segment of the lesson before reporting their findings back to the class as a whole. In jigsaw learning, the students have the opportunity to utilize a number of methods to learn the material (labs, data analysis, research), with a high degree of freedom in how they do so. Then, they’re responsible for teaching the rest of the class regarding their findings. This method does a great job of letting students take charge of the material and encouraging discussion and exploration.
Cooperative Learning – presenting their work to the rest of the class #TogetherStronger pic.twitter.com/CtgJDSo2Dl
— Pembroke Dock Year 3 & 4 (@PDCSYr3and4) October 4, 2017
Co-op co-op
Co-op co-op is all about student-centered discussion. Students are given the ability to own their learning process by selecting the important topics from a lesson’s main idea and then breaking off to study them and present them in a similar sense to the Jigsaw method. The important distinction here is that unlike in the Jigsaw method, students are given the power to chose their area of study, as well as focus in on the important parts of the learning. This gives them a very high degree of ownership in the lesson.
Group Investigation
In the group investigation style of cooperative learning, students select a topic and come up with a long-term game plan as to how they can learn more about it. In science, this often manifests itself as students encountering a phenomenon and conducting experiments to prove it true or false. Students can also come up with useful applications as well (studying magnetism? let’s build an electromagnet!). The entire class works together to discover something, analyze data, and organize information. Each student is graded based on their contribution to the cause as a whole. Group investigation takes student involvement to an entirely new level. Students not only choose what to study, but they choose how to study it and what to do with the information once it’s acquired.
Guided Reciprocal Peer Questioning
Dialing it back from the more progressive, student-led learning styles, peer-questioning is a great way to foster group discussion in your more traditional classroom. Once a topic has been introduced, the teacher guides the class along the learning by asking leading questions to get students thinking. After the lesson, students break off into groups and come up with questions they have about the learning. Then, teams come together and discuss, teaching each other the material and coming to a better understanding themselves. Group discussion is a really powerful way to get students curious about questions they had never considered!
As the old expression goes, teamwork makes the dream work, but it should go without saying that without the proper plan put into place and without the correct classroom environment, any of these cooperative learning techniques won’t achieve the desired effect. As a teacher, it’s important to stay involved with your students during the learning process, guiding them with your knowledge, offering suggestions, correcting misconceptions, and keeping everybody on track together during the course of the learning. There’s no better way to foster passion than to meet someone else who cares as much as you do, so let your students get creative and work together to make something awesome!
Aesa, I really like how you introduce the fact that humans are social beings. I think that is something that is frequently overlooked, especially in the classroom. So often students are discouraged from speaking to one another and punished for doing so. I think it is important that you mention the fact that humans are inherently social. It gives us insight to why students operate so well in a group setting. I also really like your descriptions of cooperative learning strategies, makes it really understandable.
Shay,
I’m really glad you asked about the implementation of cooperative learning in a Physics classroom! When you get into a hard science class like AP physics, chemistry, or biology, there’s a certain stigma about being serious or prestigious or official. I think that this is at least partially why these classes tend to stick with the classic lecture style of education. This doesn’t have to be the case, though. In fact, I personally believe that the best way to teach physics is to have students conduct experiments to find the equations behind certain natural processes. You can write down F=Ma as much as you want, but a student won’t really understand that until you use kinematics to see how far a ping pong ball will be shot out of an air pressure cannon or until you replicate Isaac Newton’s derivation of the gravitational constant “G”. In physics, I think that the “group investigation” style of cooperative learning is a great way to get students to do things like this, making the equations come to life and the science real.
Aesa,
I loved the story you started off with! I really wasn’t sure where it was going at first, but then it was great to see the two friends spitballing ideas off each other on their story.
I also like how you explained each of the styles of cooperative learning. You explained them in an easy to understand manner. I really enjoyed the video you included! I think it hits perfectly on the stigma around group projects in school today!
What I want to know, is how you would implement this in your classroom? I know in my physics class in high school, we only had a few group projects and not many of them fit in with the models you presented.