This week in 525, we focused on cooperative learning and reinforcing effort.
What is the purpose of asking students to work cooperatively?
Cooperative learning can be a very powerful tool to use in the classroom. Students get the opportunity to work with others and share ideas and talents. It is important for students to learn to work with others that they may not be comfortable working with, since that would most likely happen when they are adults in the workplace.
Our first task was to explore It's a Wild Ride! This project is an interdisciplinary project where students work together to create a new roller coaster ride for an amusement park. The project incorporates the four main content areas throughout the different phases. While I think this is a great project, I am a bit surprised that other content areas weren't considered. Tech ed standards could be considered for the engineering of the roller coaster and business ed could be considered to help market the roller coaster. (But, I guess that is just me being biased to my teaching area!) Overall, the project seems to incorporate many important ideas. The students are working together, several content areas are linked together to answer the student question of "When am I ever going to use this in my life?", and it gives the students clear guidelines to follow.
Next, we had to watch two videos by Clay Shirky, Institutions vs. collaboration and How cognitive surplus will change the world. In the first video, Clay was talking about people collaborating via the internet and used the example of Flickr. His point showed how collaboration typically works, in my opinion, especially when high school students are involved. It showed how one person typically contributes the most work and the other collaborators differ in how much they contribute. I see this often when my students are doing group projects. The second video discussed how cognitive surplus is used. Clay told us that cognitive surplus is the ability for the world's population to volunteer, contribute, and collaborate on large, and sometimes, global projects. There are two things that make up cognitive surplus: the world's free time and talents and media tools that allow more than consuming, they allow creation and sharing as well. Cognitive surplus can be a powerful tool for students. Technology will allow them to increase their "surplus" of knowledge and also share their knowledge.
Emily, I too was surprised that other areas weren't looked at for the roller coaster lesson. Maybe it does make us bias, but it also does show that all too often classes, where important hands on life skills are taught, are often overlooked when they shouldn't be. It also shows that we look outside the academic box!!
ReplyDeleteI was wondering if you had discovered any strategies that might help ensure a more equal effort when students work together on a project. Can you break the projects into segments and make sure all students work on one? Or require equal parts of the assignment from each contributor? There might be ways to reinforce the effort of each person, so they all contribute.
ReplyDeleteI also believe cooperative learning in the classroom is an extremely powerful tool that can be used to teach children how to get along with and work with others that may be a little different from themselves. This is how the real world works at all levels in every day occurrences whether it be on a sports team or at your job, you will be forced to cooperate with people who see the world in a different light because they have had different life experiences. I suppose this is one of the faults I see with home-schooling and virtual schools. There is very little, if any cooperative learning, and in my experiences the children that are home-schooled are rarely exposed to other cultures, ethnicities, or religions other than their own. Needles to say, this can cause many problems once theses students venture out into the “real world”.
ReplyDeleteCooperative learning is vital, in and out of the classroom. As educators I think we have to teach students to do their part. Unfortunately, that's seldom the case. I know it wasn't in school or even in college with adults, or even in the workplace. However, when it happens great things happen. Emily, you're correct - all classes should have be included in the rollercoaster projeect. A project like that fits right into bus. ed. and tech ed. to name a couple.
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