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Ledlow:
Should you explain to students
why it is that you’re using cooperative learning? And what
do you do when you say, “We’re going to be using cooperative
learning this semester,” and your students respond, “I hate
working in groups; I don’t want to do this”? How do you
prepare for that?
Smith: Good question.
That’s after you’ve prepared the faculty! It’s a tough
challenge—do you talk about why are we doing this or how
well it works, or do you provide an experience that lets
them see it? My preference is to maybe say a little bit; but
if what you do doesn’t work very early on, all the rationale
that you provide is not going to be that compelling. I
typically recommend do something small early on that you can
then refer to that they see that, “Oh my gosh, if we work
together we can actually come up with more ideas, we can
come up with better solutions.” I think that’s more
compelling than lots of the research rationale or other
forms of rationale that you might provide to the students.
Do something that works early on.
Ledlow: Do you have an
example of one of those types of activities that might
demonstrate to students the benefits of working in a group?
Smith: A common one is
to ask them to come up with ideas individually, and so you
give them a question or a task and they write down all the
ideas that they can come up with individually. And then you
make note of how many ideas people came up with. And then
you give them a similar task where you ask them to do that
in groups of two or three. And then you compare how many
ideas and what was the quality of ideas. And then they say,
“When we interact with one another, we build on one
another’s ideas; we come up with more and better ideas.”
Another way of getting at it
is just to acknowledge that sometimes group work isn’t all
that effective. They’ve probably been in situations where
it’s been a failure essentially. One of my favorites is to
look at the figure, that [is obtained] if you plot
performance versus the type of group, and then note that
sometimes there is a dip—that the group is worse than having
people work on their own. And then to note that sometimes,
or under some conditions, groups work very well and to ask
students “What are the characteristics of the groups that
have worked really well?” And then just remind them that
this takes a lot of work and it takes careful attention to
what makes groups work.
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