Pre-Instructional Planning
Cooperative learning is an approach that generates results in proportion to how regular and disciplined it's application is. If you wish to use cooperative learning, it is a good idea to start as early in the term as possible to give your students time to develop the interpersonal skills needed to make an effective cooperative learning group. For the same reason, you will likely want to use cooperative learning for several projects, rather than using it only once. Applying cooperative learning to your classroom effectively takes some pre-planning.
Academic and Social Skills Objectives
Educators are used to developing academic goals for their students for each lesson. With cooperative learning, social skills or group processing skills are added to the mix. So you need to explicitly state these goals alongside the content goals you've set for your activity.
Group Size
How involved is the project? How many students are needed to do the job? Ideally, that's how many students you want to group. For short or simple tasks, often a pair is sufficient. Groups for a big project or base groups for an entire course will usually be larger.
Smaller groups are more effective and easier to work with than large ones, as students are less likely to be able to duck their share of work. Research suggests that groups of 3 or 5 are ideal for base groups and formal cooperative groups. Informal groups are best with 2-4 students.
Group Composition
For brief exercises, it shouldn't be a problem for students to work with their friends, but for formal cooperative learning, there are a couple of major problems with letting students assemble into groups of their own choosing:
- Heterogeneous groups tend to learn better together (Wenzel, 2000 ), although students of similar backgrounds are more likely to start off as friends.
- Close friends may fail to fully involve other students in some activities.
Random groups, especially for one-shot projects, are easy to assemble. They can be set up
- Outside of class using a roster
- Have students count off (better than random, in some ways, as it rearranges students who started class sitting together into different groups)
- Having students draw group affiliation from a hat
Selection by instructor
- You will need a detailed roster before class or you can hand out a questionnaire before the first project starts
- Students can be split up by experience: age, number of years in school (or teaching), majors, gender, race/language
- Usually a main goal will be to create groups that are as heterogeneous as possible.
Creating Interdependence
Interdependence can be built into the project already
- Just too much work for one person
- Tasks that require more than one person to do (peer review)
You can give them advice on splitting up the work, or allow them to decide. Identification of subtasks and strategies on accomplishing them may be part of the project.
A couple of techniques to enhance interdependence include:
The setup of the classroom and materials can also foster the positive interdependence you want.
- "Knee-to-knee and eye-to-eye" is a good catch phrase for how students should be arranged. This close proximity enhances the collective feel among the members.
- Only give each group one copy of the assignment information that they have to share. Learning how to share their basic materials is a good foundation to build on.
