April: Cooperative Learning

The topic this month is cooperative learning. Feel free to continue discussing the topic in March during the month as well. The chapter on cooperative learning really emphasizes the importance of using cooperative learning as an instructional strategy, albeit sparingly. The authors state that based on research, group strategies should be utilized about once per week. At the same time, the authors also stress that groups should be made based on different criteria and not necessarily ability level. Research indicates that students of low-level ability who are paired with other low-level ability students, do not perform the way they should and the instructional strategy is not effective. Finally, the authors stress keeping group sizes to 3 or 4 students per group.


The authors examine three different categories when it comes to grouping: informal, formal, and base. Personally, the most effective informal grouping activity is a Think-Pair-Share in which the students are asked to select a different partner each time. For formal groups, I typically group the students randomly while making sure that students of low-level ability are always working with a student of high-level ability. There are some awesome websites out there that will generate groups randomly. For example: http://www.transum.org/Software/RandomStudents/ works well and also saves your class rosters. There are other websites that allow the students to pick team names which helps bring a slight competitive atmosphere to the group work. 


Another strategy I've found to be effective is assigning group roles to ensure that students are held accountable and that each student in the group is contributing in a different way. I distribute cards such as the ones here to the students randomly and make sure that they are all responsible for separate work. 





Please share your own methods for selecting groups as well as how you ensure that students are held accountable when working in cooperative learning groups.