At the beginning of the semester, I always do an exercise when I first put them into groups where I have them—we do this as cooperative learning—I have them do an exercise where they identify why they don’t like working in groups, because they’ve all had bad experiences working in groups—in classrooms where cooperative learning is not really done in a good way, where they’re kind of thrown together within groups. So they always identify a lot of the things that are not so good about communicating with other students. We identify and list those on the board, and then we do another cooperative exercise on what’s good about working together in groups. And it helps them at that point to identify the good things about being in groups, about learning from other people, about making use of the strengths of different people in the groups—different people have different things that they contribute to the group. And they can learn from that, so we end on this positive note of what’s good about active learning, that we’re going to be using it all semester and do it outside of the classroom to help each other with some of the tools that we use as far as the projects. And then we do [it] inside of the classroom to reinforce the theory that they then have to apply in the out-of-class group project that they do.

                             

                                                       BACK