Cooperative Learning and Collaborative Lessons

The benefits of cooperative learning in the classroom have shown to positively affect academic success in multiple ways. Assigning students to work in groups rather than individually offers a learning arena that can help to develop their personal attitudes, values and social skills.  By exchanging knowledge and information with others, students are forced to learn about alternate or opposing viewpoints. While the role of the teacher may appear to have faded as student to student interaction takes the spotlight, the teacher’s role may be more important than before as they are acting as a facilitator to ensure the groups act respectfully while staying focused on the learning task. Borich (2011) outlines the appropriate steps to establishing cooperative task structure:

1. Specify the goal: identify the product or behavior that is expected by the end of the lesson

2. Structure the task: create groups that are equally and fairly divided by gender, age and learning ability. Decide how much time will be spent on the collaborative learning task and assign necessary roles. Offer reinforcement and rewards (i.e. grades, privileges)

3. Teach and evaluate the process: show the class how to appropriately collaborate with peers

4. Monitor group performance: observe and intervene during the process to ensure the group has understood their goal

5. Debrief: Provide feedback to the groups and discuss openly with the class how the process went and what viewpoints they learned from

As I prepare to teach high school Health, I can appreciate the benefits of using a collaborative learning approach for specific lessons. Using the Washington State EALR’s as a drawing board, here is an example of a GLE that would be appropriately met if a collaborative learning approach were used.

EALR: The student acquires the knowledge and skills necessary to maintain a healthy life:  Recognizes dimensions of health, recognizes stages of growth and development, reduces health risks, and lives safely.

GLE 2.1.1

• Critiques health and fitness data to make predictions and recommendations for lifelong wellness
• Example: Understands that limited flexibility could predict back problems in
  adult life.  Recommendation is to develop stretching routine to prevent     back problems.

Under this GLE, students are expected to think critically about health and fitness in terms of lifelong wellness. To tackle this learning expectation, I would introduce the lesson’s objective and explain the structure of collaborative learning, allowing them to ask questions before being split into learning groups. After hand-selecting groups that fairly divide students by their age, gender and learning level, I would explain their time limits and repeat their goal and the expected outcome. Using collaborative learning for this specific lesson could greatly benefit students as it provides them with an opportunity to share pieces of their cultural background and beliefs allowing for potential growth around their idea of what a healthy lifestyle is. By allowing students to collaborate on what healthy means in their own families, students are not only developing new attitudes towards lifelong wellness, but also developing new respect for their classmates.

Sources:

Borich, G. D. (2011). Instructor’s copy Effective teaching methods: research-based practice (7th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

OSPI Washington State Health and Fitness Learning Standards http://www.k12.wa.us/HealthFitness/Standards.aspx

Classroom management: the basics

A central part of classroom management is the social environment. The social environment of a classroom is truly guided by the teacher’s attitude in how they introduce materials, opinions and structure instruction (Borich, 2011). A teacher can select a more strict or laid back teaching approach showing students where the power in the classroom lies, or they can choose to remain somewhere in the middle; creating a balanced classroom between teacher and students.

The social environment of a classroom is directly connected to the social climate. Borich (2011) introduces three social climates commonly seen in the educational classroom:

• Competitive: students compete to answer questions while the teacher stands as the final judge of right and wrong
• Cooperative: students work together to engage in discussion which is guided by the teacher where they can sharpen their understandings of instructional content
• Individualistic: students work individually under the supervision of the teacher

Maintaining variety in the social climate of your classroom will most likely be the most effective way to gain continuous student engagement. As I prepare to teach high school P.E. thoughts of classroom management become increasingly important as the basic physical structure of my “classroom” will be an empty gymnasium. The lack of innate order in such a classroom can act a potential troublesome classroom environment unless structural organization is provided and established in the beginning of the school year. Since my classroom will have no desks, no seats and no traditional classroom structure, it will become my responsibility to build a strong learning environment that supports open physical learning safely but also prevents from distraction.

Source: Borich, G. D. (2011). Instructor’s copy Effective teaching methods: research-based practice (7th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.