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4.
Learn and
use pre-designed models for lesson plans
Don’t be hesitant to use pre-designed
cooperative learning models. Regardless of how much
classroom experience you have, cooperative learning may be
an entirely different style than what you are accustomed to
using, so take advantage of the work of your cooperative
learning predecessors by following their established models
or pre-designed, content-free activity structures. Not only
do most people start out with these, they also stick with
them to some extent even after they get a feel for using
active/cooperative learning in the classroom. Experience
and research have shown that they work and can be adapted to
fit just about any subject matter. Although some of them
may seem quite simple, they really work to encourage
teamwork and high-level learning and thinking skills. Most
instructors start out with these strategies; pick which ones
work best for them, their students, and their subject
matter; and then adapt them as necessary. If you haven’t
done so yet, be sure to view the section on
Pre-Designed, Content-Free
Structures.
Faculty/Expert
Commentaries:
Richard Felder
“I’m using a
model from
Johnson and Johnson for
cooperative learning…. The [first criteria is] positive
interdependence—that means the team members have to count on
one another to do what they are supposed to do, otherwise
everyone loses. [The second is] individual accountability,
which means everyone is held responsible for what they’re
supposed to be doing, and they’re also held responsible for
what everyone else is doing—one way or the other. [The
third is] face-to-face interaction at least part of the
time. Now it can’t be the kind of thing where, you
do problem one, you do problem two, I do
problem three, and we come together, staple them, and hand
them in. That happens a lot, but that is not cooperative
learning. The fourth is the development of interpersonal
skills you need to work effectively in teams. Students are
not born knowing how to do these things—conflict resolution,
communication, leadership, time management, and so forth.
There has to be some attention paid to helping students
learn how to do those things. And the fifth condition is
regular self-assessment of group functioning. Periodically,
students have to stand back from what they’re doing and ask
themselves, ‘What are we doing well as a team? What could we
be doing better? What are we going to differently next
time?’ ”
Ron Roedel
“Think-Pair-Share
is especially good at the upper-division material where I
want students to immediately process some point. I’ll
mention some derivation in the classroom, and I’ll ask
everyone to look to [his/her] partner and comment on this,
‘What would have happened if I had put a plus sign here
instead of a minus sign here? What would have happened if I
had raised the temperature instead of lowering the
temperature? Talk about it for two minutes, and then we
will discuss that.’ So I think Think-Pair-Share is a
brilliant way of bringing students into the dialogue.
“When I
began, I tried many different approaches. I wanted to see
if I could tick off, in my classes, all the different kinds
of cooperative learning approaches like
Jigsaw
and
Academic Controversy
and so on. I’ve reduced that set to the
Bookends
method and the
Think-Pair-Share
. I think those are the only two that I substantially
use now, and I think they have worked the best for me.
Professor
[Karl] Smith
from Minnesota says, ‘That’s right, Ron. Not
every approach is meant for every class and for every
instructor. Use the ones that you like the best.’”
Darwyn
Linder
“I
think [pre-designed, content-free structures are] an
excellent place for people to start, because most folks who
teach in college don’t have a lot of experience, or a lot of
training actually, in teaching per se and not in cooperative
learning [specifically]. So having, in a sense, a recipe
that you can follow, like the
Jigsaw
classroom,
is a good way to start with a fairly high probability of
success. Then, as you get comfortable in those settings and
understand how they work and appreciate the need for those
kind of structures, you can tailor-make some structures that
will work for you—work in your own classroom, work with the
kind of material you’re trying to teach. But I always tell
people to start with what looks like it will be simple,
because it’s not. Running an effective cooperative learning
classroom is a complex task. In a sense, it becomes an
individual task for the instructor, so building up your
repertoire and building up your skills before you try to
design something entirely on your own, I think, is
important. And those structures work; we know that they
work. If you put the right materials into the right . . .
slots in those kinds of structures, they’re going to produce
a good learning outcome. And that gives the class a
successful experience. It gives the instructor a successful
experience, so I think those are very useful.”
Greg Raupp
“Things
like a
Jigsaw
I tend to use for what I would call lower-level learning
objectives—knowledge content, a little bit of understanding
content—that can be done very well with a Jigsaw.
Rather than having everyone go out the night before and
learn 100 percent of the material for that day, you assign
each person twenty-five percent. They come back and teach
each other. It works very, very well. The students like
it, because really they’re only essentially doing only
twenty-five percent of the work outside of class they would
be do otherwise. Almost all of the session is interactive
in that case. We do some things with the Jigsaw
where we put expert groups together and then separate them
and have them go back out after they have worked together,
so there’s that kind of tailoring of the process.
Think-Pair-Share , all those things we use, and they all work very
well. The better the students know them, the more you can
focus on the real content.”
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