Cooperative learning is a strategy designed to help you maximize your own and other classmates' learning. This strategy makes use of small groups and students working together as a team. The team approach has proven successful not just for learning in college classrooms, but also in the workplace, in community activities, and even in the home. The cooperative learning team uses specific techniques to make sure everyone in the group meets the defined goals. NOBODY gets to slack off, and no member of the group gets stuck with all the work.

Cooperative learning is more elaborate than group work activity. Cooperative learning can be incorporated into your classroom management system. If you train your students to work effectively in groups, the results can be a very productive and fun learning environment.

Collaborative and cooperative learning are so closely related that the two terms are often used interchangeably. However, let's take a moment to address the similarities and differences in the two. Both learning theories assign specific tasks, both use groups, and both require the students to share and compare their findings. In both cases, discovery approaches are used to teach interpersonal skills and student talks are stressed as a means for working things out.

Cooperative learning is an educational approach which aims to organize classroom activities into academic and social learning experiences. There is much more to cooperative learning than merely arranging students into groups, and it has been described as "structuring positive interdependence." Students must work in groups to complete tasks collectively toward academic goals. Unlike individual learning, which can be competitive in nature, students learning cooperatively can capitalize on one another's resources and skills (asking one another for information, evaluating one another's ideas, monitoring one another's work, etc.). Furthermore, the teacher's role changes from giving information to facilitating students' learning. Everyone succeeds when the group succeeds. Ross and Smyth (1995) describe successful cooperative learning tasks as intellectually demanding, creative, open-ended, and involve higher order thinking tasks.

Five essential elements are identified for the successful incorporation of cooperative learning in the classroom:

positive interdependence

individual and group accountability

promotive interaction (face to face)

teaching the students the required interpersonal and small group skills

group processing

Collaborative learning has British roots and is based on the findings of English instructors who explored ways to help students take a more active role in their learning.

It is a teaching methodology in which «students team together to explore a significant question or a meaningful project» [ 1; 17].

Collaborative learning is a method of teaching and learning in which students team together to explore a significant question or create a meaningful project. A group of students discussing a lecture or students from different schools working together over the Internet on a shared assignment are both examples of collaborative learning.

Cooperative learning was first used in America and can be traced back to Goffman’s philosophy of the social nature of learning. It is a «specific kind of collaborative learning »[2; 32]. In this setting, not only is the group assessed as a whole, but students are also individually accountable for their work.

Cooperative learning, which will be the primary focus of this workshop, is a specific kind of collaborative learning. In cooperative learning, students work together in small groups on a structured activity. They are individually accountable for their work, and the work of the group as a whole is also assessed. Cooperative groups work face- to-face and learn to work as a team.

In an individualistic learning situation, students are independent of one another and are working toward set criteria where their success depends on their own performance in relation to established criteria. The success or failure of other students does not affect their score. In spelling if all students are working on their own and any student who correctly spells 90% or more words passes, it would be an individualistic structure.

In a cooperative learning situation, interaction is characterized by positive goal interdependence with individual accountability. Positive goal interdependence requires acceptance by a group that they «sink or swim together.»[3; 11]. A cooperative spelling class is one where students are working together in small groups to help each other learn the words in order to take the spelling test individually on Friday. Each student's score in the test is increased by bonus points earned by the group. In that situation a student needs to be concerned with how she or he spells and how well the other students in his or her group spell. I his cooperative umbrella can also be extended over the entire class if bonus points are awarded to each student when the class can spell more words than a reasonable, but demanding, criterion set by the teacher.

There is a difference between having students work in a group and structuring students to work cooperatively. A group of students sitting at the same table doing their own work, but free to talk with each other as they work, is not structured to be a cooperative group as there is no positive interdependence. (Perhaps it could be called individualistic learning with talking.) There needs to be an accepted common goal on which the group will be rewarded for their efforts. In the same way, a group of students who have been assigned to do a report where only one student cares, does all the work and the others go along for a free ride, is not a cooperative group. A cooperative group has a sense of individual accountability that means that all students need to know the material or spell well for the group to be successful. Putting students into groups does not necessarily gain positive interdependence and/or individual accountability; it has to be structured and managed by the teacher or professor.

References

1. Foster, P. 1999. The influence of planning and focus of planning on task-based performance.

2.Goffman, E. 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford.

3. Long, M. 1991. Focus on form: A design feature in language teaching methodology. Amsterdam.