Face to Face Interaction
Activity 1
Teachers learning about cooperative learning have many questions about student behavior and how to group students. As important who to group together is also a concern. That's what this activity is about. Everyone in your group has a role. The facilitator will read the scenario below and then you all will discuss it as a group. Your group members may have different experiences and perspectives on how to handle the concerns teachers face with placing students into groups. Your group's task is to build individual and collective repertoires in implementing cooperative groups. Your group will reflect on face- to- face interaction and its importance in cooperative groups. Your group will document the collective responses using the reflection template found at the bottom of the scenario.
For this activity, a is the time keeper, b is the facilitator, c is the resource manager, d is the reporter. The reporter will collate the reflective responses of the group. The resource manager will ensure the response document is posted/uploaded.
Scenario
"One of the rationales of grouping children up in the classroom is that each child has some particular strength and that will be brought out by the wide variety of tasks that are assigned to the group. In this way, the thinking goes, students who are good at one skill can be a leader in that area, while another child, who has different strengths, will take over in a different area.
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A favorite example given is the child whose basic skills are very low but who draws very well. So the teacher enthusiastically groups her with one of the higher level students, knowing that she can contribute to the group via her artistic skills. She has something to offer the group that perhaps the others don't have, and it allows her to shine even in an academic project. It sounds great, but a few questions nag. Like, what if she doesn't always want to be the group artist? What if her drawing is a very personal thing to her and it embarrasses her to have it made public?
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In my training I have been told by many teachers that they always pair up the weakest student in the class with the strongest. In this way, the teacher can tap the resource of the strong students and use them to help teach their fellow classmates within the classroom community. I think that this is perhaps the problem that I have the greatest difficulty with. Why should the so-called quicker students be obliged to teach their fellow students all the time? Do they have a choice in the matter? I know many people who, in their school days, whizzed through their work, and then were able to do all sorts of extra reading and projects on their own. Is there something wrong with that? Many of these students, as well as the children I have observed in my own classrooms, were not quick in just one area, but had strong skills in almost all areas. They were the kids who were `good at school'. If they were going to do a group project, they wanted to pair up with kids who were on a similar level, which in my assessment, was because on some level they understood that they would be stimulated by each other.
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I think it's a mistake to think that a child who shows strong academic and/or leadership qualities wants to be in that situation all the time. Sometimes they want a break. And sometimes, they may want to coast. And sometimes they want to work alone. I find myself returning again and again to this notion of balance. When we stick to one model inflexibly, many personal needs are likely to go unmet."
Retrieved from: http://www.behavioradvisor.com/CoopLearning.html
Johnson, D., Johnson, R., & Holubec, E. (1993). Cooperation in the classroom (revised).
Minnesota: Interaction Book Company.
