INDEX

BACKGROUND

CHARACTERISTICS

ELEMENTS OF COOPERATIVE LEARNING

RESEARCH RATIONALE

AUTOEVALUATION

REFERENCES

An overview of Cooperative Learning

AN OVERVIEW OF 

Roger T. and David W. Johnson 

Originally published in:
J. Thousand, A. Villa and A. Nevin (Eds), Creativity and Collaborative Learning; Brookes Press, Baltimore, 1994.

Without the cooperation of its members society cannot survive, and the society of man has survived because the cooperativeness of its members made survival possible.... It was not an advantageous individual here and there who did so, but the group. In human societies the individuals who are most likely to survive are those who are best enabled to do so by their group.

(Ashley Montagu, 1965)

How students perceive each other and interact with one another is a neglected aspect of instruction. Much training time is devoted to helping teachers arrange appropriate interactions between students and materials (i.e., textbooks, curriculum programs) and some time is spent on how teachers should interact with students, but how students should interact with one another is relatively ignored. It should not be. How teachers structure student-student interaction patterns has a lot to say about how well students learn, how they feel about school and the teacher, how they feel about each other, and how much self-esteem they have.

There are three basic ways students can interact with each other as they learn. They can compete to see who is "best," they can work individualistically toward a goal without paying attention to other students, or they can work cooperatively with a vested interest in each other's learning as well as their own. Of the three interaction patterns, competition is presently the most dominant. Research indicates that a vast majority of students in the United States view school as a competitive enterprise where one tries to do better than other students. This competitive expectation is already widespread when students enter school and grows stronger as they progress through school (Johnson & R. Johnson, 1991). Cooperation among students-who celebrate each other’s successes, encourage each other to do homework, and learn to work together regardless of ethnic backgrounds or whether they are male or female, bright or struggling, disabled or not, is still rare.

BASIC DEFINITIONS

Even though these three interaction patterns are not equally effective in helping students learn concepts and skills, it is important that students learn to interact effectively in each of these ways. Students will face situations in which all three interaction patterns are operating and they will need to be able to be effective in each. They also should be able to select the appropriate interaction pattern suited to the situation. An interpersonal, competitive situation is characterized by negative goal interdependence where, when one person wins, the others lose; for example, spelling bees or races against other students to get the correct answers to a math problem on the blackboard. In individualistic learning situations, students are independent of one another and are working toward a set criteria where their success depends on their own performance in relation to an established criteria. The success or failure of other students does not affect their score. For example, in spelling, with all students working on their own, any student who correctly spells 90% or more words passes. 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." 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 another day. Each student’s score on the test is increased by bonus points if the group is successful (i.e., the group totals meet specified criteria). In a cooperative learning situation, a student needs to be concerned with how he or she spells and how well the other students in his or her group spell. This 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, criteria set by the teacher.

There is a difference between simply having students work in a group and structuring groups of 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. For this to be a cooperative learning situation, there needs to be an accepted common goal on which the group is rewarded for its efforts. If a group of students has been assigned to do a report, but only one student does all the work and the others go along for a free ride, it 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 whole group to be successful. Putting students into groups does not necessarily gain a cooperative relationship; it has to be structured and managed by the teacher or professor.

Auto evaluation about Coperative Learning

Introducing Co-operative Learning
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Introducing Cooperative Learning
Objective: to study basic definitions of Cooperative Learning, and to distinguish between CL and traditional group work.
A. Activating Background Knowledge…
1. Reflect on these questions:
 What do I know about Cooperative Learning?
 What experience do I have with this approach?
 What would I like to know about it? Why?
2. This is an off-line task for you to reflect on your learning process. Once you participate in the FORUM: Getting to know each other, complete the following chart:
K / W / L Chart What I know What I want to know What I learned *
* You will complete this column once you have finished this unit.
3. What did you partners state in the forum? Compare your answers. Is there anything you would like to add to your chart?
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B. Defining Cooperative Learning…
1. Carefully read the following definitions of Cooperative Learning.
“Cooperative learning is group learning activity organized so that learning is dependent on the socially structured exchange of information between learners in groups and in which each learner is held accountable for his or her own learning and is motivated to increase the learning of others” (Richards & Rogers, 2001).
“Cooperative learning is the instructional use of small groups so that students work together to maximize their own and each other’s learning” (Johnson, Johnson, & Holubec, 1993).
“Cooperative learning, a particular type of active learning, is a formal instructional approach in which students work together in small teams to accomplish a common learning goal. It is important to understand that cooperative learning is fundamentally different than simply asking students to work together to complete a task” (Foundation Coalition: Active/Cooperative Learning, 2002).
“…most cooperative approaches involve small, heterogeneous teams, usually of four or five members, working together towards a group task in which each member is individually accountable for part of an outcome that cannot be completed unless the members work together; in other words, the group members are positively interdependent” (California Department of Education (2001) as cited in Trujillo, 2002).
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2. From the definitions you read, which concepts do you consider are the basis of the CL approach? Write 5 of them down in the diagram below.
3. How are these five concepts interrelated? Summarize your ideas in the following lines.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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C. Testing your understanding…
1. Watch the video TEAM WORK (uploaded to the virtual classroom) at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF80RqLkl6E or/and look at the following pictures and answer the question below:
a) b)
2. What are three important elements from the definitions of Co-op Learning that can be depicted in the video / picture? Explain each one of them.
 _____________________________
________________________________________________________________
 _____________________________
________________________________________________________________
 _____________________________
________________________________________________________________
a) A group of sculptors working together on their work of art for a sand sculpture’s competition that takes place every year in Jesolo-Venice.
b) Ancient Egypt: a sculpture created in 2004.
According to the organization committee, “Each team member stimulates the other and this synergy creates a very pleasing, and often surprising, collective result. By the end of the training they have created a work that all are proud of. The net result to the client is individual integral comprehension of the necessity of working together. This fosters mutual appreciation between not only the team members, but also between the teams themselves, as they recognize the contribution each team has made to the project as a whole” (Taken from http://sandconstructions.wordpress.com)
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D. Assessment Task – Questionnaire #1
1. Read the following definition of Cooperative Learning stated by Kagan Spencer (1994).
Cooperative Learning
Cooperative learning is a successful teaching strategy in which small teams, each with students of different levels of ability, use a variety of learning activities to improve their understanding of a subject. Each member of a team is responsible not only for learning what is taught but also for helping teammates learn, thus creating an atmosphere of achievement. Students work through the assignment until all group members successfully understand and complete it.
Cooperative efforts result in participants striving for mutual benefit so that all group members:
 Gain from each other's efforts. (Your success benefits me and my success benefits you.)
 Recognize that all group members share a common fate. (We all sink or swim together here.)
 Know that one's performance is mutually caused by oneself and one's team members. (We cannot do it without you.)
 Feel proud and jointly celebrate when a group member is recognized for achievement. (We all congratulate you on your accomplishment!).
Taken from: http://edtech.kennesaw.edu/intech/cooperativelearning.htm
3. Compare it with the definitions presented at the beginning of this session.
4. Now, compare your definition of traditional group work with the concept of co-operative learning (CL) from the definitions presented in this session. How are they similar/different? Use the diagram provided to outline your ideas. Include at least six different ideas. Then, write your answers in a word document and submit your work in Assignment Dropbox #2.
Coop-Learning Project, 2011 / Domian, González, Porras and Rodríguez. Page 7
TRADITIONAL COOPERATIVE
GROUP WORK LEARNING
Coop-Learning Project, 2011 / Domian, González, Porras and Rodríguez. Page 8
Thanks a lot for your valuable response!!!
For this assessment task, you will be graded according to the following criteria:
 Explaining at least six different ideas, the trainee was able to compare his/her own concept of traditional group work with the definitions of co-operative learning (CL) presented. Outstanding
( ) Satisfactory
( ) Unsatisfactory
( )
Comments: ________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________

Characteristics of CLL

Characteristics of the Cooperative Language Learning

Theory of language

Richards and Rodgers in their book Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching (2003) stay that there are some basic premises in which the approach is based, and they mention some authors to explain their point of view about cooperative nature of language:

• Premise 1: “Born to talk” (Weeks 1979), the author says that all human beings are born to talk and to communicate, that we just have to follow the normal way of our human development and we are going to learn to talk.

• Premise 2:  People organize their speech in conversation. “Human beings  spend a large part of their lives engaging in conversation and for most of them conversation is among their most significant and engrossing activities” (Richards and Schmidt 1983: 117).

• Premise 3: Conversation operates according to a certain agreed-upon set of cooperative rules or “maxims” (Griece 1975).

• Premise 4:  “One learns how these cooperative maxims are realized in one’s native language through casual, everyday conversational interaction” (Richards and Rodgers 2003).

• Premise 5: “One learns how the maxims are realized in a second language through participation in cooperatively structured interactional activities” (Richards and Rodgers 2003).

Theory of Learning

“CLL also seeks to develop learner’s critical thinking skills, which are seen as central to learning of any sort. Some authors have even elevated critical thinking to the same level of focus as that of the basic language skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking”. (Kagan 1992), mentioned by Richards and Rodgers (2003). The CCL approach is based on the cooperation rather than competition on, but to have a fair grade of cooperation each student in a group or team must be able to have critical thinking to participate and provide ideas to the group work.

Types of teaching and learning activities

Johnson, Johnson, and Holubec (1994:2) mentioned by Richards and Rodgers (2003) explain that cooperative learning groups can be described in three different types as follows. 

• Formal cooperative learning group: this type of group goes from the specific time of a class to several weeks. It is established for specific tasks and involve students working together to achieve shared learning goals.
• Informal cooperative learning groups. These are groups formed at the moment of the class which last from a few minutes to one class period. These groups are used to focus student’s attention or facilitate learning during direct teaching.
• Cooperative base groups:  These are long- term, they are formed to work for at least one year and consist of heterogeneous learning groups that develop supporting, helping, encouraging, and assisting abilities in each student towards their classmates to have academic success.

However, Richards and Rodgers (2003), also stay in their book the importance of organizing the groups following some important features to have a successfully group work.

·         Positive interdependence occurs when group members feel that what helps one of them will help any of the group, and what affects one does affect the group as well. It means that each member of the group will do his or her best effort in each assigned task, this to obtain good results for him or herself and as a result for whole group. It creates a great sense of responsibility among the members because if one fails the rest will fail too, but if one does an excellent job the entire group will have an excellent job.

·      Group formation is an important element because it enhances interdependence among students. The group size is, usually, from two to four. The people in each group are chosen either by the teacher or students, or at random. It is very important for the performance of the group to assign roles within the members of the group; therefore, each one knows what to help with. Sometimes when students work in groups there are some people who leader the work and some others remain passively avoiding responsibility, and waiting for the rest to do the work.  As a result, it is very important to give a specific function to each member of the group in order to have all the students collaborating in the assigned task. 

·   Individual accountability involves both individual and group performance. The group work will be reflected in the individual performance and knowledge development. It means that if a student learns to be responsible in a group, to think and analyze things carefully to obtain good results, they will continue doing the same in their individual work, and will also help, to improve their academic outcomes.

·  Social skills are developed as well as reinforced through group working. When the students interact in group work constantly, they learn to listen and respect other people’s opinions, and to understand that two heads think better than one. In addition, they became more confident of themselves and they learn to value their classmates’ efforts as well as their own. 

 Learner roles

The most important role of the learner is to be part of a group work in which they have to work collaboratively on assigned tasks. Besides, the learners have to be directors of their own learning as they are educated for planning, monitoring, and evaluating their own learning process. One more role is to be participants of pair grouping which is the most typical CLL format. Here, the learner must be changing roles that include partners in the role of tutors, checkers, recorders, and information sharers. (Richards and Rodgers, 2003).

Teachers roles

The teacher roles are different from the common roles that a teacher who is only in front of the class has. According to Johnson et al (1994) some of their roles are:

• To create a highly-structured and well-organized learning environment
• To set goals
• To plan and structure tasks.
• To establish the physical arrangement of the classroom
• To assign students to groups and roles
• To select materials and time for each lesson
• To be a facilitator who is constantly moving around the class helping students, clarifying, giving feedback, encouraging the group to solve their own questions and problems, and giving the necessary support the group members.

http://teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=67334&title=Cooperative_Learning