Cooperative Learning and Groupwork

READ

Students Must Be Taught to Collaborate, Studies Say. Education Week (May 16, 2017)

 Read

Stanford professor and mathematics educator Jo Boaler writes in her book Limitless Mind about the cognitive benefits of collaboration:

• An important change takes place when students work together and discover that everybody finds some or all of the work difficult.

• This is a critical moment for students, and one that helps them know that for everyone learning is a process and that obstacles are common.

• Another reason that students' learning pathways change is because they receive an opportunity to connect ideas.
• Connecting with another person's idea both requires and develops a higher level of understanding.

• When students work together (learning math, science, languages, English, social studies-- anything), they get opportunities to make connections between ideas, which is inherently valuable for them.

Activity 1: Review 4 Cooperative Learning Formats

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Group work: Using Cooperative Learning Groups Effectively from Center for Teaching, Vanderbilt University 

Review the following cooperative learning formats

• List two potential benefits and two potential complexities for using each approach as a teacher

• Choose one approach from the four and describe in 2 to 3 paragraphs how you might use it with students in a class you are teaching. How would cooperative learning help you to achieve your goals for the class?

1.  The Jigsaw Classroom

• Cooperative Learning Sample Lesson Using Jigsaw Method

2. Graffiti Groups

3. Think-Pair Shares

• Talking History, a lesson for English Language Learners 

4. In Any Case: Conducting a Mock Trial from The New York Times Learning Network

Activity 2: Design a Groupwork Learning Experience Using an Online Game

The site Stop Disasters! from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has five online games for students to play: Tsunami, Hurricane, Wildfire, Earthquake and Flood.

While the Stop Disasters! games can be played individually, this activity asks you to describe in a 1 to 2 page response how you would use one of these games in a group work lesson with students

Begin by playing one of the Stop Disasters! games

• What game did you play?
• What level did you play?
• What did you see as strengths and drawbacks to the game?

Questions to consider for your response about how to use the game with student learning groups:

• How many students would you put in a group and why?
• How would you introduce the lesson before asking students to play a game?
• How would you discuss or process the experience after students had played the game? 
• How would you assess student learning?

Of Historical Interest

 View Archival Footage of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906

MATERIAL BELOW IS NOT PART OF THE ASSIGNMENT, BUT MAY BE OF INTEREST

Cooperatives and Worker-Owned Companies as Democratic Organizations

Cooperatives

"A cooperative business is any business that is worker-owned and operated in a democratic fashion"(Surprise! It's a Cooperative, Valley Advocate, August 4, 2016, p. 12)

2.5 million co-ops worldwide; in the United States 30,000 cooperatives provide 2 million jobs. 

• For more, Facts about Cooperatives

Cooperative Identity, Values and Principles from the International Cooperative Alliance.

• Principle 2: Democratic Member Control

History of Co-Ops

Food for a Change Film Trailer (2014). Discusses retail food cooperative movement in the United States

Employee-Owned Businesses

The Employee Ownership 100: America's Largest Majority Employee-Owned Companies (July 2020)

More Worker-Owned Businesses are Sprouting, USA Today, May 12, 2016

Find a Worker-Owned Business or Cooperative Organization in the community where you are teaching or where you live.

• What skills do students need to learn in school to succeed as a member of one of these organizations? 

• PVSquared

PV Squared is a worker-owned cooperative focused on high quality, full service solar for homes and businesses throughout western Massachusetts and southern Vermont.

To Think About: Single Gender Cooperative Learning Groups

Most research on cooperative learning stresses the importance of heterogenous groups where girls and boys as well as higher-achieving and less strongly motivated individuals work together.

However, here is one differing set of research, although from a college setting.

Female Peers in Small Work Groups Enhance Women's Motivation, Verbal Participation and Career Aspirations in Engineering. Nilanjana Dasgupta, et. al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 2015.

• Having a high concentration of women in engineering teams allows women students to participate more actively, shrug off worries and feel confident.

• Study done at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with 120 undergraduate engineering students

• Importance of small groups or micro environments composed mostly of women or men and women in equal numbers instead of groups that are mostly male