3.      Get support or learn from peers.

 As with the workshops, sitting in on a peer’s cooperative learning formatted class can be a vital learning experience.  And, if no one in your department is currently using the active/cooperative techniques, find someone in another department.  While it may not be quite as beneficial, it can still give you a good feel for the use of these practices in the classroom.  Not only can these colleagues provide you a model to follow, they can also provide you with support as you begin incorporating these techniques.     

Faculty/Expert Commentaries: 

Ron Roedel

“The first thing you should do is sit in one of my classes or sit in one of Greg Raupp’s  classes or sit in one of Susan Ledlow’s  classes . . . to see how somebody who is practiced at it actually carries it out.  See a variety of different people, so you can see different approaches and look for the ones that resonate with you.  The ones that you think look the most effective, the most fun to try, are probably the most meaningful in your own classroom.” 

Susan Urban

“Suzanne Dietrich and I have worked together on this particular course and put an awful lot of planning into this.  A lot of this has been funded by an NSF [National Science Foundation  project through the Education and Human Resources division at NSF.”                                                                                        

Veronica Burrows

“Greg Raupp , in our department, was working with a new set of course materials that was developed for a course that was taught at Texas A&M.  What I didn’t realize at the time was that Greg was instituting some new pedagogy, some new approaches to the teaching.  I had gone into the class only to view the class, to see what Greg was doing, because I was going to teach it the following semester.  I saw him do an interactive exercise and I was astounded at how well it worked, and I decided I had to do something like that.”

 Jim Richardson

“Our freshmen curriculum is team-taught, and so we meet weekly with other teachers.  I would team-teach a section with another engineering professor.  We had two classes.  We each met in two different classrooms, but each class was identical, so we would plan out the week’s activities ahead of time.  That took a lot of coordination, and then we would always talk about what went well and didn’t go well.  That was probably the most valuable source of feedback on learning how to use cooperative learning.”                                                                                                 

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