Cooperative learning is an approach to organizing classroom activities into academic and social learning experiences. It differs from group work, and it has been described as "structuring positive interdependence." Students must work in groups to complete tasks collectively toward academic goals. Unlike individual learning, which can be competitive in nature, students learning cooperatively capitalize on one another’s resources and skills (asking one another for information, evaluating one another’s ideas, monitoring one another’s work, etc.). Furthermore, the teacher's role changes from giving information to facilitating students' learning. Everyone succeeds when the group succeeds. Ross and Smyth (1995) describe successful cooperative learning tasks as intellectually demanding, creative, open-ended, and involve higher order thinking tasks. Five essential elements are identified for the successful incorporation of cooperative learning in the classroom.
Read more about Cooperative Learning: History, Types, Elements, Cooperative Learning Techniques, Research Supporting Cooperative Learning, Limitations
Famous quotes containing the words cooperative and/or learning:
“Then we grow up to be Daddy. Domesticated men with undomesticated, frontier dreams. Suddenly life—or is it the children?—is not as cooperative as it ought to be. It’s tough to be in command of anything when a baby is crying or a ten-year-old is in despair. It’s tough to feel a sense of control when you’ve got to stop six times during the half-hour ride to Grandma’s.”
—Hugh O’Neill (20th century)
“Experiences in order to be educative must lead out into an expanding world of subject matter, a subject matter of facts or information and of ideas. This condition is satisfied only as the educator views teaching and learning as a continuous process of reconstruction of experience.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)