Aug29

Cooperative Learning

What's the best way to set up cooperative learning groups for labs and other activities? How often should I change the groups? I'd also like to assign roles for group members, but I need some examples.
— Doug, Henderson, Nevada

Cooperative learning is a strategy supported by a wealth of research. The term often reflects a continuum of approaches, from generic "group work" to more structured activities. (Use the phrase in an Internet search to find resources such as Why Use Cooperative Learning? and Cooperative Learning.

There is no single or "best" way to set up groups. This is a great opportunity for action research as you try different configurations and note which ones seem to work better for your students. Consider these questions:

How many should be in a group? Groups of four seem to be effective in my experience. It's easy in a triad for one student to be ignored, more than four is a crowd at lab tables, and in a pair there is the issue of what happens when one of the students is absent.

How should the groups be structured? This is where you'll need to do some experimentation, because each class is different.
  • You could start with a random assignment. There are websites with random number generators, and programs like Excel have them, too. Some teachers take a low-tech approach and literally draw names using craft sticks or index cards. As the students work in these initial groups, you can observe the students' interpersonal skills, work habits, and how combinations of personalities work.
  • I hesitated to use student-selected groups. Usually, friends wanted to work with friends, and I was concerned about the students who were selected last or not at all (remembering my own experiences as a non-athlete at recess). I was also worried students wouldn't learn how to work with a variety of people. Recognizing the need for students to have a voice in the classroom, I tried a variation in which students could give me a note with the name of one person they would like to work with. I then structured the groups to try to accommodate their choices, with no guarantees.
  • Some teachers suggest grouping by ability. I'm wasn't sure how to determine science "ability"—I suspect teachers use factors such as reading or math ability, grades, work habits, or behavior. I found heterogeneous grouping worked best for my classes most of the time. Once I did put four slackers together. After a while they realized they had not accomplished much, and no one was going to bail them out! Sometimes if I had students with an intense interest in a topic, I had them work together.
  • There are other student variables to consider. Depending on your class, you many find single-gender groups provide more opportunities for student participation. If your class includes special education students, check with the specialist to determine their needs in terms of their IEPs.

How often should the groups change? Changing groups for each activity allows students to get to know others, but students also learn if they don't get along, it doesn't matter—the group will change next time and they don't need to resolve any difficulties. I would usually try to keep the groups intact for a unit. This also saved time, because the students knew who their partners were and which lab table was theirs.

Setting roles is a key component of cooperative learning so students share the responsibility for learning. The roles may vary from task to task: group leader, presenter, data recorder, measurer, equipment manager, liaison (to ask questions of the teacher or other teams), artist, online researcher, questioner, timekeeper, notetaker. The literature on cooperative learning describes other roles. Have job descriptions for each role (as checklists or on the bulletin board), and ask students to describe how they and their teammates did their jobs (this could be a exit activity). Rotate the roles so students have a variety of experiences.

To keep the groups focused and on-task, be sure that students understand the expectations for the project or investigation. Share the rubric ahead of time. Monitor the groups as they work, eavesdropping on their discussions and observing their interactions (this can be a formative assessment). Cooperative learning models emphasize the importance of both groupwork and individual accountability. You could have the group create some parts of a report together (perhaps in their notebooks or with a class Wiki or GoogleDoc page) and then have each student write his or her own conclusion or summary. Some teachers hold each student be responsible for one part of a project, evaluating each component separately and then assigning a holistic evaluation for the entire project.

You may have students who do not have a high level of interpersonal skills. Start with brief and highly structured activities. Model cooperative behavior, and work with them on what types of language is appropriate in their groups. And remember there are times when cooperative learning is effective, times when large group instruction is appropriate, and times when you want students working independently.

For more information on how other science teachers are using this strategy, go to the NSTA Learning Center to search for articles on cooperative learning.
Published: Aug-29-09 | 2 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Aug19

Perseverance and "Failure"

With all of the curricular demands and a focus on preparing for state exams, I am concerned that we do not create situations for students to persevere if they don’t succeed in their first attempts at experiments in science. How do we communicate the value of curiosity and perseverance to high school science students and the notion that repeated "failure" is common on the road to major breakthroughs?
—Noelle, New York, New York

When watching children play video games or teenagers texting at the speed of light, I marvel at how they learned these skills on their own--through trial and error, practice, watching each other, and self-evaluation. You raise a good question: Are students encouraged to use these learning strategies in school?

Students hear failure and mistakes are not an option, with airline pilots and brain surgeons as examples. While I hope pilots and surgeons would not make errors in the cockpit and operating room, I suspect they did make some errors during simulations and supervised training—under controlled circumstances where they see the results of their decisions in a variety of situations. This training provides opportunities to learn how to recognize when things go wrong and to experience many problem-solving and decision-making situations, so they’ll remain calm and collected when things go haywire in real life, as they inevitably do. .

What happens when students make mistakes or when something does not go well the first time? I suspect some teachers use the red pencil to focus on the mistakes and take points off, even when students are learning and practicing new concepts and skills. Do students learn that mistakes are bad in school, perfection is required at all times, and there are no second chances? Perhaps some students are so afraid of being labeled a "failure" they've learned it's less painful to do nothing. It could be helpful if we model how to recognize a mistake or error and what to do about it. Even if we have to make a deliberate error, we can demonstrate how it could be corrected and prevented and what can be learned from it. We could even describe our own attempts at learning something new. (I told my students that if they ever felt frustrated to visualize me in my first aerobics class—what a disaster!)

We should not condone sloppy or careless work, but I wonder if sometimes it would be helpful to allow students to make mistakes. Shouldn't we encourage them to reflect, ponder, and problem-solve before asking for help? Just as "helicopter parents" hover over their children to prevent mistakes or failure, I think well-intentioned "helicopter teachers" hover over their students and intervene even if students do not ask for (and may not really need) immediate assistance, just a little time to think things through. Of course, teachers must intervene if there are safety issues or when students are genuinely frustrated.

Can we help students learn perseverance if science activities are neatly packaged in one-period chunks rather than opportunities for ongoing investigations? What do students learn about the nature of science if all activities have a single, correct answer or conclusion? It would be helpful for students and teachers to meet scientists (either in person or online) and learn about their day-to-day work. A museum scientist described to my students how his longitudinal research on amphibian populations was taking several years (it was interspersed with other projects). He noted how he revised the project several times and how some data did not seem to "fit," which led to other research questions.

It's not necessary to wait until high school to encourage perseverance and curiosity. In a fourth grade class I visited, students were investigating the relationship between volume and temperature. They had made predictions/hypotheses, but as the teacher put their data on the board, it was apparent that they were too varied to see any trends and come to any conclusion. As the teacher tried to think of an explanation, a student remarked, "Maybe we didn't all do the experiment in the same way." Other students chimed in with suggestions: they may have read the thermometers incorrectly, perhaps they did not all measure the balloons accurately, or maybe the balloons had tiny holes in them that allowed air to escape. The teacher then joined the discussion about the importance of controls in an experiment and the value of consistency and accuracy in measurement. When the students asked if they could repeat the experiment, she helped them annotate the procedure with their suggestions and promised they could try again. After class, she reflected on the lesson. She said that at first she was disappointed the activity did not work out as planned, but she was excited about the way the students responded. She concluded that learning from a "failed" experiment was a valuable experience. (And later in the year, her class scored well above average on the state science exam!)

A recent blog entry Student Success: Genius or Perseverance? on the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) web site also addresses this topic. Readers, feel free to share your own experiences or other resources, too.
Published: Aug-19-09 | 1 Comment | 1 Link to this post

Aug07

Getting to Know Your Students

I've read a lot about the value of making connections with students. But it seems impossible to connect with individual students when I meet with 150 per day in my classes. Any suggestions or advice?
—Bethany, Rochester, Minnesota

When I was student teaching, I had to shadow a student for an entire day and reflect on what I observed. Going over my notes, I realized not once during the school day did my student (a 10th grader) have a conversation with an adult. No teacher called on him in class; no adult said hello in the hallway. The cashier in the cafeteria didn’t even say ‘thank you’ when he paid for his lunch! Perhaps this was not a typical day, but if it was, I wondered how lonely this student must have felt, as one of the many "invisible" students passing unnoticed from class to class. As a teacher, I made it my goal that no student should ever be invisible.

It's easy to connect with the students who demand our attention: the hand-raisers, the outgoing personalities, those who are genuinely interested in science, and those who use negative behaviors as attention-grabbers. Getting to know every student is simpler in a self-contained classroom where a teacher and students are together for most of the day. In a secondary classroom, however, trying to connect with 150 students seems like an impossible task. But there are strategies to make this doable.

Ask each student to record data on an index card: name, birthday, nickname, interests/hobbies, school activities, out-of-school activities (e.g., jobs, community organizations, volunteer work), and other conversation-starters. (Use a different color card for each class.) Then for each class each day, the student on top of the deck would be your "target." This is not a formal student-of-the-day designation or event, but just a subtle way of ensuring that you're interacting with each student. During the class period, greet him/her at the door, call on her for an answer or to share a thought, ask him to be the assistant to write on the board or overhead, or interact with him/her during seatwork or groupwork. In a little more than a month, you will have interacted with each student in this focused manner. The cards can also be used to randomly select a student for an answer or a job, ensuring that it's not just the hand-raisers or those in the front of the classroom who participate.

Some other ways to connect include
  • Stand in the hallway to talk to students as they come in. A friendly hello, compliment, or comment may be one of the few positive interactions students have with an adult that day. (For some classes, especially if lab equipment is set up, stand just inside the door to keep an eye on things.)
  • Use students' names in class conversations: "That's a good idea, Marcus" or "Do you have anything to add, Maria?" A seating chart with the students' nicknames is helpful at the beginning of the year to connect names and faces.
  • A quick note, e-mail, or postcard with a positive remark goes a long way to making the student feel accomplished and part of the class.
  • Get to know students in a different setting by attending school functions and events occasionally. Some students' parents may not be able to attend, so a friendly cheer or bravo may mean a lot.
  • Consider having lunch with students or talking to them in the lunch line.
  • My colleague and I strongly believed labs should not be used as homerooms, so we volunteered for morning hall duty instead. We stationed ourselves at the bus door and pleasantly greeted students as they came in. For many students we were the first adults to interact with them in the morning, and they looked forward to seeing us. (/ul>

There is also the option to connect with students online, but there are a number of pros and cons to this approach. If you're intrigued with using social media (such as Twitter or Facebook), the August 2009 issue of Learning and Leading with Technology has an interesting point/counterpoint discussion Should You "Friend" Your Students?

Of course, your connections with students should always be on a professional level. Most of the students already have friends to hang out with. But many of them need caring adults in their lives who take an interest in them and make them feel valued and "visible."

Please feel free to add your suggestions for getting to know your students.
Published: Aug-07-09 | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post