What do you need to have a successful group task?
Cooperative learning should involve students working in teams to accomplish a common goal, under conditions that include the following elements:
1. Positive interdependence
Team members are obliged to rely on one another to achieve the goal. If any team members fail to do their part, everyone suffers consequences.
2. Individual accountability
All students in a group are held accountable for doing their share of the work and for mastery of all of the material to be learned.
3. Face-to-face promotive interaction
Although some of the group work may be portioned out and done individually, some must be done interactively, with group members providing one another with feedback, challenging one another’s conclusions and reasoning, and perhaps most importantly, teaching and encouraging one another.
4. Appropriate use of collaborative skills
Students are encouraged and helped to develop and practice trust-building, leadership, decision-making, communication, and conflict management skills.
5. Group processing
Team members set group goals, periodically assess what they are doing well as a team, and identify changes they will make to function more effectively in the future.
How many of these actually happen when you set up cooperative learning situations in class?
Have I missed anything out? Let me know!
- Yearinthelifeof's blog
- Login or register to post comments
Log in or register
Follow TeachingEnglish
 |
 |
 |
 |
Comments
What about those weaker learners, the ones with learning disabilities or attention disorders? Students may be upset about including such students in their group.
Perhaps you can include about giving group members tasks that will enable them to contribute to the group despite their "issues"?
Thanks for another interesting post!
Naomi
You're welcome, naomishema. So, I guess you're suggesting that the composition of the group - the actual people in the group - are as important as the task itself? I hope this is what you're suggesting, as this backs up research thatI've been conducting recently.
What other things do we need to consider in terms of the members of the group?
Thanks a lot for your sharing..very real & nice points that you touch ;)
Actually, the second part of the article I was posting about yesterday http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/blogs/naomishema/really-they-claim-bra...
discusses that quite a bit. In the real world it seems that the most productive groups consist of people from different background, or disciplines, etc. They also discuss how the degree of familiarity between the members (how long they have worked together in the past) plays a role.
Back to the classroom. You have to make sure that the kid who writes really slowly and painfully isn't the one denoted to be the "scribe" while you want the ADHD kid to be the roving reporter. I think you get the picture!
You're welcome, lemanulas. glad it's interesting for you. I'll keep going in the blogathon thanks to your great support.
You're definitely on to something there, naomishema. There's much less written about the composition of the group in ELT literature than the composition of the task. The pole you put together can only work as a group ifthey're given a chance to work as a group. How many times do we put random groups of people together and expect them to perform a task in the language classroom without giving them a chance to work out their roles and responsibilities?
Well here's an example of the advantage of talking to people from different backgrounds right now - I guess you don't often get input from a special ed teacher!
LOL!
naomi
You're right aboıut that, naomishema.
Ofcourse :) thanks ;)
I might write a follow up to this about group formation. Thanks for the comments and inspiration.