Before implementing cooperative learning groups in a course, both
instructors and students need to prepare.
As the instructor, you should have asked yourself, and answered,
the following questions. How can you structure your group work so
that:
- Each person feels that they need, depend on, and value each other
for success?
- Group members directly engage and communicate with each other?
- No member gets a ‘free ride’ at the expense of others?
- Groups are reflecting on, and improving, their ability to work
cooperatively?
(See here
for suggestions on how to address all these issues.)
The next thing to do is to prepare your students. You have to be
ready for the fact that college students often have negative perception
because of their past poor experiences with cooperative learning due
to poor implementation by teachers who neglected to prepare properly
for it. You have to overcome that skepticism.
Students also tend to have unrealistic expectations about how well
they can work with others, and hence get discouraged when problems
arise, so I share with them the following information (also avaliable
as a [.pdf] document):
In a survey of 1 million high school seniors about their ability
to get along with others:
• all thought they were above average,
• 60% though they were in the top 10%, and
• 25% thought they were in the top 1%.
(College Board (1976-1977) Student descriptive questionnaire.
Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service, quoted in How We
Know What Isn’t So, by Thomas Gilovich, Free Press, NY,
1991, p77)
The importance of learning the skills developed in cooperative learning
has to emphasized.I do this by sharing this information (also available
as a [.pdf] document):
82% of companies employing over 100 people require their employees
to work in TEAMS. (Gordon, J. (1992) Work Teams: How Far Have
They Come, Training, 29(10), 59-65.)
In their annual survey of business schools, the Wall Street
Journal (September 9, 2002) ranked the skills that recruiters
deem important when hiring, along with the number of recruiters
who ranked those skills as “very important”:
1. Communication and interpersonal skills (90%)
2. Ability to work well within a team (87%)
3. Analytical and problem-solving skills (86%)
4. The ability to drive results (81%)
WSJ reports that these ‘soft skills’ are hard to develop
because people think they are already good at them.
Note: By working in a group one can learn how to motivate other
group members and manage the group so that it produces results.
Thus, the 1st, 2nd, and 4th ranked skills can all be honed through
work in student work groups.
Once the groups have
been formed, this can be done by providing questions to be discussed
by student group members that alert them to the kinds of things that
can happen and how to deal with them. These questions can be discussed
in class by each group, and their responses shared with the whole
class.
- Based on your past experiences with group work, what do you think
are the factors that lead to successful group work?
- What do you think are the kinds of things that cause groups to
be fail or become non-productive?
OR
What are the things that other people do that really bug you when
working with them on some joint project?
- What steps will you take if one or more of those negative conditions
start appearing in your group?
Here are some other suggestions that would help groups run better:
- Groups should periodically have explicit discussions about these
skills and how to improve them.
- Group members should write periodic journals on their group experience.
- Groups should periodically self-assess how well the group is functioning.
(The instructor can also assess the working of the group.) This can be done by:
- Asking each group to list at least three actions that helped
the group be successful.
- Asking each group to list one action that would make the group
even more successful.
- Groups should agree right at the beginning to working
rules amongst themselves as to how work is to be divided, performed,
shared, reported, and written.
- Members should ensure that group processing times do not degenerate
into gripe sessions where some members simply vent their irritations
with others. This can be done by groups establishing ground rules
that criticisms should not be phrased negatively but as positive
suggestions. i.e., in the form of statements such as ‘Perhaps
you might try doing it this way’’ instead of ‘‘I
wish you’d stop doing this.’’
Also, if possible, it is advisable for the instructor to meet with
each group for about 15 minutes during the first two weeks after the
groups have begun working to gauge how well the group is doing and
to discuss their responses to the questions. It also helps to get
periodic assessments from each group about how well they are functioning.
