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The first thing I had to learn,
when moving from the lecture mode to the cooperative
learning mode, was that the classroom environment experience
was very different. In the lecture mode I was the only
speaker, and the rest of the class had to be as quiet as
dormice. Now, in cooperative learning, students are talking
out loud, they're talking to each other, they're talking
across the room, they're getting up and going around,
sharing information. So the management of the classroom was
first internal. I had to learn to get used to the noise
level being higher. I also had to learn how to justify to
administrators walking by that, "This isn't chaos; this is
organized, believe me."
The second thing was that I
had to learn how to get around quickly from team to team. My
class this term has twelve teams in it, and, in every
fifty-minute class period, I manage to get to each of those
teams at least three times per period. So I don't spend a
lot of time with each team, but I make sure that I
communicate personally, one on one, with each and every one
of the teams to make sure that they understand what we are
doing, they're making progress on the problem, they're
keeping abreast of the situation, etc.
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