Cooperating—learning in the context of sharing, responding, and communicating

Many problem-solving exercises, especially when they involve realistic situations, are complex. Students working individually sometimes cannot make significant progress in a class period on these problems. They can become frustrated unless the teacher provides step-by-step guidance. On the other hand, students working in small groups can often handle these complex problems with little outside help. Teachers using student-led groups to complete exercises or hands-on activities are using the strategy of cooperating—learning in the context of sharing, responding, and communicating with other learners.

Working with their peers in small groups, most students feel less self-conscious and can ask questions without feeling embarrassed. They also will more readily explain their understanding of concepts to others or recommend problem-solving approaches for the group. By listening to others in the group, students reevaluate and reformulate their own sense of understanding. They learn to value the opinions of others because sometimes a different strategy proves to be a better approach to the problem. When a group succeeds in reaching a common goal, student members of the group experience higher self confidence and motivation than when students work alone.

“Learning often takes place best when students have

opportunities to express ideas and get feedback from their

peers.”37

American Association for the Advancement of Science,

Project 2061

Hands-on activities and laboratories are best done, and sometimes must be done, in groups. Many teachers assign student roles for these activities, such as equipment custodian, timer, measurer, recorder, evaluator, and observer. Roles instill a sense of identity and responsibility and become very important as students realize that successful completion of an activity depends on every group member doing his or her job.38 Success also depends on other group processes—communication, observation, suggestion, discussion, analysis, and reflection. These processes are themselves important learning experiences. Many research studies show that cooperative or collaborative learning promotes higher student achievement than traditional individualistic and competitive methods. 

But greater understanding of academic concepts is not the result of simply placing students in groups and telling them to work together. In fact, some efforts at using cooperative learning can be counterproductive. For example, some students may not participate in the group processes at all, while others may dominate; group members may refuse to accept or share responsibility for the group’s work; the group may be too dependent on the teacher for guidance; or the group can be sidetracked by conflict. Two of the leading researchers in cooperative learning, David Johnson and Roger Johnson, have established guidelines to help teachers avoid these negative conditions and create environments in which students may be expected to learn concepts at a deeper level of understanding. These guidelines include:

• Structuring positive interdependence within student learning groups. Positive interdependence means that each student feels that he or she cannot succeed unless all the members of the group succeed. According to Johnson and Johnson, teachers create positive interdependence by making sure students have common goals and rewards, making students depend on other students for resources, assigning a role to each student in a group, and ensuring that tasks are equally divided.

• Having students interact while completing assignments and ensuring that the interactions are on-task. Interactions include student-to-student help and encouragement, explanations of ideas and problem-solving strategies, and discussions of other ideas related to the assignment.

• Holding all students individually accountable for completing assignments and not letting them rely overly on the work of others. Johnson and Johnson describe two strategies for holding students accountable: giving an individual test to each student rather than allowing group work on tests and randomly selecting one student’s work to represent the work of the group.

• Having students learn to use interpersonal and small group skills. These skills include leadership, decision making, trust building, communication, and conflict management. Most high school students have never learned these skills, and unfortunately they are not commonly taught or practiced in high school. Many researchers and educators have published successful strategies for teaching interpersonal and small group skills.

• Ensuring that learning groups discuss how well the group functions. When students receive feedback on their participation in the group, they can reflect on their roles and, if needed, adjust and adapt their social skills to help the group meet its objectives. Johnson and Johnson describe group processing as metacognitive thought about the functioning of the group.

Cooperative learning clearly places new demands on the teacher. The teacher must form effective groups, assign appropriate tasks, be keenly observant during group activities, diagnose problems quickly, and supply information or direction necessary to keep all groups moving forward. As with the other contextual teaching strategies, the teacher’s role changes when he or she uses cooperative learning. The teacher is sometimes a lecturer, sometimes an observer, and sometimes a facilitator.

Like the other contextual teaching strategies, cooperating is difficult but worth the additional effort if increasing student achievement is an important goal. Johnson and Johnson’s research indicated that, when teachers use cooperating, their students’ achievement increases significantly. Average students in cooperative classrooms were found to perform at much higher levels than average students in either competitive or individualistic classrooms. Specifically, students in the 50th percentile in cooperative classrooms were equivalent to students in the 71st percentile in competitive classrooms and equivalent to students in the 75th percentile in individualistic classrooms.43 “In addition to the successful solution of math problems and the mastery and retention of math facts and principles, cooperative learning, compared with competitive and individualistic learning, promotes more frequent discovery and use of high-quality reasoning strategies, the generation of new ideas and solutions (that is, process gain), and the transferring of the math strategies and facts learned within the group to subsequent problems considered individually (that is, group-to-individual transfer).”

“Changes in the workplace increasingly demand teamwork,

collaboration, and communication. Similarly, college-level

mathematics courses are increasingly emphasizing the

ability to convey ideas clearly, both orally and in writing.

To be prepared for the future, high school students must be

able to exchange mathematical ideas effectively with

others.”------National Council of Teachers of Mathematics