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Hello Friends,
Let us add a new spin on our threads by breaking tradition and opening similar forum discussion topics, while allowing educators to choose a primary and/or intermediate level focus for their postings. This may allow “posters” an opportunity to become more specific in suggested resources and instructional strategies, while encouraging other readers who have never posted, to take the plunge and join us!

With the 2010-2011 school year nearly completed I find myself reflecting on lessons, inquiry activities that my students and I felt were successful, and targeting those that I need to further develop.

Cooperative learning is an instructional strategy that incorporates academic and social skill learning. As science educators, we understand the critical importance for our young learners to be engaged in their learning while developing their communication skills. Many young learners are comfortable operating electronic equipment – but hesitate to 'jump in' when teachers encourage verbally sharing information.

I am inviting you to share your pedagogy, behavior management skills, inquiry learning strategies or personal lessons for PreK – 5 levels in this discussion forum as we prepare for a summer of renewal and growth.

Enjoy your week, Alyce

[i][color=blue]Alyce wrote: I am inviting you to share your pedagogy, behavior management skills, inquiry learning strategies or personal lessons for PreK – 5 levels in this discussion forum as we prepare for a summer of renewal and growth. [/color][/i] WOW Alyce - what a great idea to have a forum for the PreK-5 set! I would love to see an elementary forum where this and threads for a book chat, resources, etc. could go together.

I have found that cooperative learning and more importantly collaborative learning is a matter of culture...by this I mean, the culture of the classroom (and the school, for that matter). Kids must first feel safe. Then, they must be "taught" and be able to "practice" different protocols/structures to know how to interact with one another. I always had a lot of structure at the beginning of the year or semester, but as they learned, there was less. I start out simple, then move to more complex when they've mastered the simple. For example, practicing and teaching/learning how to do a simple think-pair-share first, then moving to more complex, multi-person groupwork where they must defend their answers. I loved doing "fishbowls" where one group would be the "fish" and the rest of the group would watch them interact and cooperate (or not!) and then critique and debrief what they did well, and suggestions for improvement. In fact, each time we did any sort of cooperative learning, we debriefed both the content and how well we did working together. We kept a chart on the wall of what "good" cooperative learning looked like and would check/remind ourselves after each time. Time consuming at first, but by about 6 weeks, became routine! My favorite resources...Responsive Classroom materials and Kagan.

Wendy - We've both talked about Responsive Classroom in other threads - it really is an amazing set of tools for establishing classroom culture. One thing I wonder about is the communication at the end of a project. Especially when we are focused on the cooperative learning goals of a unit, I find that I sometimes slip into trite end products or the lack of a challenging end product at all because we are so focused on what is n our science journals/what we have shared during class discussions etc. Your posting what good cooperative learning looks like to refer back to reminded me that having a simple product that supports future learning can be so much more important. What other ideas are out there to share?!

Wendy spoke of developing culture which is a Must!!! I think responsive Classroom provides the protocols for student learning to show they are listening by having their eyes on the speaker. Students learn how to converse with each other without raising hands. Participating in morning meeting provides an intitial structure for conversing. Students then are able to move to structures designed to assist in scientifc argmentation. I am thinking specifically of Chapter 5 in Ready, Set, Science which lays out what the teacher should be doing and what the students should be doing in a science meeting. All of this must be intentionally taught. No assumptions. I know that when I was still in the classroom, I made very incorrect assumptions. I hope my post can help others develop the culture needed for effective science dialogue in the classroom. Kathy

This topic has also been discussed on the NSTA list serves. For those of you who do not follows these, I have aggregated the attached list of resources.

Sorry all, Here is the attachment.

Attachments

Cooperative_Learning.docx (0.01 Mb)

Caryn, I think the end "product" is so very important and can be so very difficult to design. As I taught, the best end products were those that were authentic, motivating, and really incorporated a synthesis of their learning. These types of products are so very difficult to come up with! It also can't take so much time just to do the product (a book,, for example) that we took time away from all our other objectives.

Wendy - I agree - I wonder if we can share some of our best end products here in this thread, tying them into the original cooperative learning topic...I'll start up off with one of my favorites... students choose to work in groups of 2 or 3 to research a constellation. At the end of their research they must be able to 1) star hop to their constellation, 2) identify the major stars in the constellation and talk about them using our class astronomy vocabulary, and 3) tell the myth of their constellation and 4) create pages for our program. The program is handed out to family members at our end of the semester astronomy night in the planetarium where they take over the laser pointer to show off their star hopping and story telling skills. They also need to be ready to answer any questions from the audience. Truly a performance task worthy of the name!

I will be leading a science enrichment program this summer, and will have students in grades 4-7 (plus a grade 3). I am trained for high school, and I have to say, anticipating 25 small people is a little intimidating! I do want to break the kids into cooperative learning groups, and my initial reaction is to include students from all levels in each group, to allow the older kids to scaffold the younger ones, especially since I geared the content more to middle school. I also thought I would try to maintain the groups through the entire four week period, so that they develop communication and personal skills that reflect those needed for future study and work. I wanted to get input from all of you who have had experience with this age group. Please let me know if this has a chance of working in a very inquiry-oriented classroom. We will evaluate the kids, but there will be no grading. All activities will be very hands-on.

Hi Jennifer! I love working with multi-age groups - especially in more informal settings. One thing I would suggest is that you do not rely on the older kids to scaffold, but almost look at it as providing differentiation for the group - providing material at different levels - such as different vocabulary - and allowing the kids to settle where they are most appropriate - you may get a younger child who has digested everything there is to know about bottle based ecosystems and an older one who has never touched soil before! In terms of keeping the groups the same for the 4 weeks - if you are providing the opportunity for groups to share out then you might end of having students swapping between groups based on interest or if a group really isn't working well together. Good luck - I am sure with all the planning you are putting in to it - it will be fantastic!

I am thinking that in my science class and I think in others, it is collaborative learning that is happening rather than the Johnson and Johnson model of cooperative learning. Maybe it is a combination of both. I am thinking that in my science groups I usually had a materials manager, a time keeper and a faciltiator. Those are different roles than the ones in ooperative learning but the modelis very similar.

I know I relied on the protocols that I developed in Morning Meeting to hold through no matter what the subject area. Responsive Classroom

How do other educators use groups in science? What roles do you use in your group?

Kathy

Adah - Is it possible that the 5 and 6 student groups are the result of a teacher needing to manage the groups? I know that I use larger groups sometimes because it is better for me to manage 4 projects or parts of a jigsaw than 6. It is not frequent but I think there is a place for them.

Hello all, I am a future teacher and have enjoyed reading your posts on cooperative learning in science, in the elementary grades. I have a great article that discusses how students work cooperatively to learn about magnets. I love how the article uses the phrase student wonderings to describe inquiry. In the article, Attracting Student Wonderings, Science and Children, students learn successfully through working cooperatively. While aligning content with student inquiry, this 1st grade classroom explored through the use of magnets. Students were encouraged to generate a list of what they had learned and connect their new findings to supported evidence. As students worked with their groups, they developed new inquiries while revising misconceptions, through experimentation. Cooperative learning plays a huge role in student discovery, as well as the opportunity these students were given to use open inquiry and construct their own knowledge. This article is a must read! Enjoy!

I am a student teacher right now and I just read a chapter from the book, [u]What Successful Science teachers Do[/u]. Using research strategy 23 on utilizing formal cooperative learning methods in the classroom, the text talks about how it has been shown that students who engage in cooperative learning groups exhibited greater academic achievement and productivity than students working alone. Students also improved their social and interpersonal skills, used higher-level reasoning and problem solving skills, and spent more time on task. Cooperative learning methods show to be very beneficial for students and that is always a good thing. Below-average student performance showed significant improvements when they were placed in cooperative learning groups. Above average students showed no improvement, but it was not detrimental that they were placed with lower-level students in cooperative learning groups. I like the fact that the chapter explains that cooperative learning is not the same as group work or collaborative learning. Cooperative learning is more structured and takes into consideration the composition of the group. The strategies of cooperative learning also have five common features that result in high-level learning outcomes. The common features are positive interdependence, individual accountability, interpersonal interactions, social skills, and group processing. The features of cooperative learning are what set it apart from simple group work. There has to be a way for the teacher to observe and assess the members of the group both individually and as a part of the whole. Likewise, the students need to understand their responsibility to the group, the responsibility of others in the group, how each member affects the functionality and outcomes of the group, and how to work together with their group to accomplish a common goal. I really thought that the research and explanation gave really good direction and an indication of how to properly implement cooperative learning and why it works so well when done correctly

Wow! I'm grateful for this post and the valuable resources. I am a 2nd year science teacher Many of your comments about teaching cooperatively or collaboratively are what I have experierenced incorporating project based learning in a multi-age classroom. Having said that, thank you Pamela Auburn for your attachment. You've saved me alot of researrch. To Wendy Ruchti's reply about a safe classroom culture, whew! The heart of my success this coming year is creating a culture of safety so that all my students respect the learning process. Whether is's a Responive Classroom approach, PBIS, Kagan or other behavioral classroom management strategies I will have to model expectations of classroom behavior and learning. My last sentence speaks to Jennifer's comment about 5-6 students in a group of 5th graders. If not front-loadeded with expectations, a "pack mentality" could ensue. If Jennifer wouldn't mind attaching a list of her"very-hands on" activities I would be very grateful.

Like many of the other posters, using collaborative learning has proven to be a very effective method in my classroom. I really liked how Etta pointed out the differences between group learning, cooperative learning, and collaborative learning. When I'm using collaborative learning in my classroom, I've learned (through trail and error) that one of the most important aspects is the group composition. Ensuring that each student has a "job" and that the groups are made up of students who can work together is essential to a successful learning environment. Adah had a question regarding the size of groups in elementary classrooms. I usually try to limit my group size to 4 students, but I wonder if either the nature of the collaborative work project or classroom dynamics made it more feasible to use larger groups. Many elementary classrooms already have teams set up for going to the library, lining up for lunch, rotating through stations, etc. Maybe the teacher was using previously established teams since the students would have already been familiar with the other students in their group? Thank you Wendy, Caryn, and Tiffany for sharing your methods and sharing resources.

Now that the summer program is over, I can give some feedback on what worked for me and what did not. First, I was working with a mixed age grouping, and my initial reaction was to mix in some of the older kids as mentors for the younger kids. What I found was that many of the younger ones had selected the course as enrichment, while some of the older ones were there to fill time between reading and math, and were much less engaged and mature than some of my younger kids. I also had a lot of absence due to vacations, which is the reason I had chosen larger groups to start with. I ended up mixing up the groups each day. I found the self-selected groups tended to group along student "profiles;" namely, students who were interested in working were extremely engaged, and those who weren't tended to be disruptive. I did find that same-gender groups tended to be more effective, and that groups of 3 seemed optimal for most activities. I was also working with another individual who planned a couple of the activities. He didn't expect that one activity would require as many materials as it did, so we had groups of 5-6 students. While not a disaster, I think that smaller groups would have given individuals more ownership of the process. The other thing that I discovered is that preparation and setup are critical to having an effective group experience. A classic activity for this group is making goop (white glue cross-polymerized with borax solution). Instead of having the materials set up at each work table, we had a gallon jug of glue, and found ourselves distributing it to each child, one at a time, rather than supplying a small bottle and allowing the kids to discover how changing the ratios of the materials affected the experimental outcomes. I definitely would have preferred dropping in on the groups as they were working to seed a few questions, rather than standing at the front of the room pouring glue into cups! There was also little incentive to continue to try alternative solutions. As each student finished one process, they stopped experimenting and played with the results! This was my first experience with the elementary age kids. It seems to me that we need an even higher level of advance planning and grouping than with older students, and probably it is important to keep the groups at a smaller number. Older students are better able to follow instructions on their own, and do more of the setup. Also, the experiments may be more complicated, and there may be more "jobs," allowing for larger groups.

Jennifer - welcome to the elementary world - at least temporarily! ;-) your insights and feedback are great and bring up the issues that we struggle with each day - like prepping for an experiment, finding "jobs" and group sizes to keep everyone engaged and even how to keep students in the scientific end of the experiment when clearly the results are so tempting to just play with!

I have been trained on and use Kagan Cooperative Strategies in my classroom. Students love to work in these diverse groups settings. The following is a link where you will find some of the strategies Kagan describes in his book: http://weblink.scsd.us/~prodev/Humanities/other%20kagan%20structures.pdf I am also a science trainer for my county. I have been training teachers to use inquiry-based science kits as a part of an initiative driven by our state department of education. Using inquiry-based science in my classroom is a breath of fresh air. My students cannot wait to do science each day. Students love to develop their own conclusions and techniques to solve problems in our science lessons. The students as a result have a better grasp of the concepts explored in our science time. I love the use of inquiry science in my classroom.