Faculty/Expert Commentaries:

 Ron Roedel, Arizona State University

“I first was exposed to it through a seminar given by a Professor [Karl] Smith  from Minnesota.  Professor Smith has written extensively on the matter.  He conducts workshops, so I attended a few of those.  I read his texts on cooperative learning.  I read other materials by people who carry out cooperative learning.  And then I discovered I wasn’t the first one at ASU to think about cooperative learning.  There were other resources on campus for me to learn.  There were “brown-bag lunches,” for example, from the Center for Learning and Teaching Excellence  that I attended, where people who were learning how to use cooperative learning were sharing their experiences informally.” 

 Jim Richardson

“Karl Smith  came and gave us an excellent half-day workshop on cooperative learning.  We’ve had other speakers, such as Rich Felder, early on.  I’d go to educational conferences, and sit in on workshops and papers and so forth, and then we would talk.”   

Cesar Malave

“. . .  I took the [short] seminar given by Lynn Bellamy. . . .  Karl Smith came to our university, and he also gave us a one-day seminar.  And then I attended a three-day seminar with Karl Smith at Rose-Hulman—it was part of the Foundation Coalition.  And I remember also that I came here to ASU in the summer, and I took a seminar not only in active and collaborative learning—it was more on teaming—and the seminar was delivered in an active way.  So that, to me . . . was something really important, because I was able to see how somebody was using active learning [to] teach . . . me a concept.”                                                                               

P.K. Imbrie

“Actually, I attended a workshop by Karl Smith —and I had done the traditional “race-across-the-board” kind of classroom teaching—and then he came and gave a workshop, and I went "Wow! This is really cool," because you actually engaged the students.  Well, for the workshop he engaged us, but I saw how you could use that for students.  So I went and tried it right after that, and it was really neat because you watched the students doing stuff versus you doing stuff, and I think that's what teaching's all about.”                                                                      

 Eric Guilbeau

“The person responsible for me getting involved in cooperative learning was Lynn Bellamy, a faculty member in the department of chemical and biomaterials engineering, who was very interested in total quality learning and applying the principles of Demming to improve the educational processes.  He . . .  encouraged a group of faculty within my department to attend a workshop at Rio Salado College.  Then, following that, Lynn arranged a number of workshops with experts who came to the college to give us ideas about how to apply it and made us aware of some basic resources on cooperative learning.”                       

Vince Pizziconi

“I was the ‘second wave,’ introduced to cooperative learning through Professor Guilbeau and people in the engineering college who provided workshops on introducing those new concepts into the classroom.”                                                                                                     

Gregg Raupp

“My colleague had seen active, collaborative learning practiced at a couple of other institutions and at some workshops, [and he] suggested that.  I got interested in it, and we went to a workshop that summer, a three-day workshop, which I guess was my boot camp….    

“Within those three days, this was a very active boot camp; it was not, ‘We are going to talk at you and you are going to figure it out on your own.’  It was, we walked in, and the first thing was, ‘Introduce yourself to your neighbor.’  They gave us basically an active, collaborative learning exercise to start that particular workshop.  The whole workshop, the whole three days, we were basically in the middle of doing it—mostly from the side of what the student experiences—but we were seeing it modeled the whole time.  It wasn’t at all that kind of workshop where they try to sell us on the technique, giving us lots of statistics, giving us lots of presentations.  Instead, it was three days of actually doing it.  And so, it was a good boot camp from that point of view.  Most of what happened after that was a trial and error process, where we took many of the structures . . . we saw at the workshop, and tried to form them in different cases and then see what worked.  Then we adopted those things that worked well, and those things that didn’t work well, we tried to change, and gradually became more and more comfortable with the process as a whole as we went.” 

Russ Pimmel

“We had the Foundation Coalition  there [at the University of Alabama], and they had some people come in and give some workshops on it, and I went and listened.  I wasn’t a convert at first, and [I] just thought about it for a while and started doing a few things.  What really got me was, when we were doing our senior capstone course, of course, nobody wanted to do it; and we had to have it, so we decided to put some professional skills in it—communication, ethics, design methodology, and so on.  I’d never done anything like that before, so I went out and did the usual thing—got a bunch of material, packaged it, and lectured, and dumped it on them for fifty minutes.  And everybody was bored, including me, and they weren’t learning very much.  So I thought, “We’ve got to do something different.”  At that time we had the cooperative learning people coming in, so that’s how I got started.” 

 Richard Felder

“An important part of the workshops is pointing people to the research.  We beg people to do what they’ve been trained to do, and not just take our words for this, but check the research out for themselves; and if it’s persuasive, try the methods.” 

 Richard Layton

“In my first couple of months as a faculty member, I attended a workshop.  It was a one-day workshop where cooperative learning was the topic, and the ideas that were presented really resonated with my experience in industry; and so it seemed obvious that, yeah, these were the kinds of things we should do in class.”

                                                                                Back