Personal reflections about cooperative learning.

Gonzalo Gallego Clemente.  1º MGEP-B.

Musical chairs. (1º group.)

The ideas that this group exposed about cooperative learning are plenty but they based their work on four permanent ideas:

·         Share ideas: in a work group, is necessary that all its members have voice and speak up when they think they have something interesting to say in order to improve the report that all are doing. In the other side, they have to respect each other’s’ point of view when they don’t have the same perspective of the same task.

·         Creating a noncompetitive environment: through cooperative learning structures, students are more likely to cooperate with the others students of the class rather than compete against themselves for the best individual grades.

·         Getting knowledge/learning from your equals (pupils.) : cooperative learning is an opportunity to create a good environment in class in which the pupils become teachers of others pupils. So the teacher is not the only knowledge font, everyone in the class have a voice and their own knowledge. This kind of working tries to lead children to cooperate in order to get a high understanding about the task, the teacher requires.

·         Diversity: in the work groups, you may find people that you don’t feel comfortable with or different respect you but that’s the key. The diversity within a group is what makes cooperative learning succeed, the members of your group are going to see, know or manage  things you may don’t see, know or manage and viceversa.

The best thing that I have found in this work is the concept of cooperative learning as a noncompetitive method of giving class. Even though I think competition, is good for all aspects of life because you always try to improve yourself and get better results. But maybe it is because since I was a little kid the system has taught me to beat the others and not to cooperate with them. Creating a noncompetitive environment in class through cooperative learning favors to children because the main thing the teacher wants them to reach is cooperation, an act or instance of working or acting together for a common purpose or benefit; joint action. So their actions will not interfere and cut others action, everyone wins.

The ideas I give to this group to improve their work are to be more creative and develop better the things they think are different from others groups, giving more curious data to make cooperative learning funnier.

Amigos del football.

This group follows the script of the group before. The more remarkable ideas I select are:

·         Improve imagination by discussing: the magic about this learning technique is discussing. Through discussing with others we improve our communication skills and we increase our own personal development defending our point of view but letting others speak to you and consider their opinion. Thanks to discussing, you make more connections in your brain so you can create more things because you know more things.

·         Participate in the group: all the members in the group need to have an active role in the work and group discussing. Everyone needs to talk and work.

·         Celebrate if their work is successful: the group may accord a date to go out and have fun if they think their work is very good. (Celebrating is a way to motivate yourself to other goals)

The best concept I get from this exposition is the activity, how to get to know pupils and make them know each other through visual language. Drawing a circle and writing on it our hobbies, it is an easy way to start a relationship, showing yourself to the rest of the class and knowing which members of the group share these hobbies.

The ideas I give to this group in order to improve their good work is to investigate more and get to deeper dots that they may think other groups has not reached yet trying to be more original and transmit their own personality in their work.

Team Perk.

The main ideas I extract from their presentation are:

·         Establish different rolls in each group: secretary, responsible, responsible assistant, secretary, responsible of the material… In each group they have to assign different functions to these rolls. Giving a roll to all members ensures that everyone is going to work because if one fail, everyone fails.

·         Group diary (work done each day and evaluation sheet): Each group will have a diary in which they write what they have done and what they have to do. They will have an evaluation sheet in which they will make a valuation of their work and extract the points the need to work more in order to get better results.

·         Establish rules together: The group need to set up some rules for the well-environmental work, and they need to establish them together so everyone will know the rules and accomplish them.

The best thing I got from this group, is the planning of the work. I saw how to make a good organization of the team members and functions: according dates, contents, documents, rolls… Organization is key to develop a great work, it gives you time to see errors and check them.

The ideas I will give to this group to improve their work by looking at other resources not only the one given by the teacher and bring some more curious things about cooperative learning.

Crónicas viajeras.

The main ideas that I’ve extracted from this group are:

·         Changing roles: in each group, specially in the jigsaw structure, each member has a roll but everyone needs to pass through all of them in order to get a learning from each section.

·         Group types: the teacher needs to assign different types of groups for different types of tasks. The teacher needs to know what are the characteristics of each type of group, and adjust what he/she wants to teach or work with each kind of group.

·         Don’t care what others think: working in groups requires to speak up what’s your opinion of what the group is going to do without any complaints, this cooperative learning structure helps shy people to be more talkative and get and active roll inside the class.

I think the main idea that this group transmit to the class was to not care about what others think about you. If you don’t have influences from others you are going to develop your own personality and principles, and even more important you get self-confidence. This is why I think cooperative learning is very useful because it helps pupils to develop not only academic skills, it teaches valors and behaviours that are nowdays, in our society.

The idea that I would incorporate into this group are some more visual resources because is always easier to associate contents with images, retaining more information in a fastest way.

Modern studies.

The three ideas that defined better their work for me are:

·         Critical thinking skills: team-work groups improve critical thinking skills because you employ discussion and reflection during the processes implicated in the correct development of the assignment.

·         Stress reduction: working with groups involves sharing the same grade of a project. The difficulty of this technique is to get everyone into an active attitude, but if everyone in a group works it will help to reduce the stress thanks to the sharing of the work and the pressure.

The best idea I get from this group is to introduce critical thinking skills concept into cooperative learning method. You depend from the others so you start reading some of their work, trying to find some mistakes and teaching your classmates how to check these mistakes. They will become a sporadic teacher, developing their critical thinking.

The idea I would give to improve their work would be to get a deep explanation of these point in class because since my point of view, it was a really interesting note that the rest of the groups didn’t think about.

The unknowns.

The main ideas that I got from the presentation of this group are:

·         Role rotating: the students have to change the roles they do in each task the teacher asked. This idea helps students to amplify their skills  in different areas getting more personal experience on them.

·         Teacher = guide: the role of the teacher changes, the teacher is not the General of the Army anymore. The teacher rather than being the General needs to be like a captain, leading his/her team to accomplish different objectives and purposes, helping them.

Finally, like all the other groups, they did their activity. It was fun and dynamic. We had to do a very large circle along all the classroom and we had to spend a ball saying things we liked and things that do not each time we receive the ball. Later we had to form group with those colleagues who had more or less our likes. It is a good activity not only for the students to know each other, also to the teacher to knows his students. The only thing that I would improve from this group is to make things more visuals and dynamic.

Wanderslust:

This group was the best of all, they explain the topic through a video. They didn’t have any content new so the best thing I extract from this presentation was the idea to transform a content/information from a book into a comedy scene. I think you learn a lot having fun and that’s what they did, make us laugh and enjoy through their work making us learn something new.

At the same time they were exposing the video, they were explaining the content and that, clarify some scenes from the movie that may not have been understood, being really dynamic and simple at the same time.

I wouldn’t give any advices to this group, I think they have the best idea to expose this topic in class, the contents were very good and they explained very well so I don’t have any mistakes or improvable things to say of this group.