COOPERATIVE LEARNING

Introduction:

        Cooperative learning is an approach to group work that minimizes the occurrence of those unpleasant situations and maximizes the learning and satisfaction that result from working on a high performance team. It is a group learning activity in which each member is responsible not only for his own learning but also for helping his group mates to learn. It is a social process grounded by structured group work, and is concerned with promoting both social and academic outcomes. It helps students learn new social skills and how to work together in order to achieve academic goals.

Definition of cooperative Learning:

        ‘‘Cooperative Learning is a teaching method where students of mixed levels of ability is arranged into groups and rewarded according to the group success, rather than the success of an individual member. Cooperative learning structures have been in and out of favour in American education since the early 1900s, when they were introduced by the American reformer John Dewey. Cooperative learning is sometimes thought of simply as ‘group work’, but groups of students working together might not be working collaboratively.’’

Some of the characteristics of cooperative learning are as follows:

·       Students work together on common academic tasks.

·       Students work together in groups of two to five members.

·       Students use cooperative, pro-social behaviour to accomplish their tasks.

·       Students are positively interdependent.

·       Students are individually responsible for their work.

Elements of Cooperative Learning:

        Cooperative learning researches David and Roger Johnson have identified five elements that define cooperative learning:

Face-to-Face Interaction:

        Students are promoting each other’s learning through face-to-face activities where they discuss and explain assignment topics with each other.

Positive Interdependence:

        Students have the sense that they’re ‘in this together’, feeling that each member’s individual effort will not only help him, but the whole group. The grade of each student is dependent upon the effort of other group members.

Individual Accountability:

        Each student is accountable for their own contribution to the group. Clearly described goals ensure that each student knows what she is responsible for and what the group is responsible for.

Group Processing:

        Students are given a means for analysing their group for how well the group has learned, and whether or not collaborative skills are being used.

Collaborative Skills:

        Students learn not only the subject matter, but interpersonal skills and how to work in teams. Students are taught skills of communication, leadership, and conflict management during the early stages of cooperative learning sessions.   

Cooperative Learning Methods:

        Before collaborative groups are formed, it’s important to teach skills of collaboration. During the lesson, a teacher should circulate around the classroom to make sure all students are participating in their individual groups. Shy and introverted students might not find the cooperative process helpful and shouldn’t be forced to be in the group. Some techniques for cooperative learning are as follows:

Reciprocal Questioning

        This method is used after a teacher has presented a lecture or lesson, and students work in groups of two or three, where they ask and answer each other’s questions about the material. Teachers provide prompts or stem questions that help students develop lesson-specific questions such as ‘what would happen if...?’ or ‘what is the meaning of?’

Jigsaw

        Jigsaw is a cooperative learning structure applicable to team assignments that call for expertise in several distinct areas. For example, in a laboratory exercise, areas of expertise might include experimental design, equipment calibration and operation, data analysis [including statistical error analysis], and interpretation of results in light of theory, and in a design project the areas might be conceptual design, process instrumentation and control, safety and environmental impact evaluation, and cost and profitability analysis.

Note-taking Pairs

        Poor note taking leads to poor performance. Designing an exercise which requires students to summarize their understanding of a concept based on notes taken [with directed questions such as what is the definition of a concept, how is it used, what are the three most important characteristics of a topic] and receiving reflective feedback from their partner provides students the opportunity to find critical gaps in their written records.

Group grid

        Students practice organising and classifying information in a table. A more complex version of this structure requires students to first identify the classification scheme that will be used.

Advantages of Cooperative Learning:

·       It has been shown to have a positive effect on student learning when compared to individual or competitive conditions.

·       It has the potential to produce a level of engagement that other forms of learning cannot.

·       Students may explain things better to another student than a teacher to a class. Students learn how to teach one another and explain material in their own words.

·       Interpersonal and collaboration skills can be learned in a cooperative learning activity.

·       Higher ability students are in a position to be experts, leaders, models and teachers; lower ability students get the benefits of having higher ability students in their group.

Disadvantages of Cooperative Learning:

·       A burden is making the students responsible for each other’s learning apart from themselves.

·       Depends on an individual’s motivation and interest on a particular subject that will determine how well they would learn.

·       It is difficult for the teacher to be sure that the groups are discussing the academic content rather than something else.

·       Higher ability students may not experience the stimulation or challenge that they would with other high ability students.

·       Lower ability students may feel perpetually in need of help rather than experiencing the role of leader or expert relative to the others in their group.

Conclusion:

        Cooperative Learning is a group learning activity in which each member is responsible not only for his own learning but also for helping his group mates to learn. It is a social process grounded by structured group work, and is concerned with promoting both social and academic outcomes. It helps students learn new social skills and how to work together in order to achieve academic goals.

Reference:

Ø Contemporary English teaching

-Dr. Ram Nath Sharma

Ø Teaching of English

-Mohammed Aslam

Ø English Language Teaching

-Geetha Nagra

Ø Effective Teaching of English

-K. Jamaludeen