I'm going to start this week's post by saying that I like the idea of cooperative learning. I really do. According to theory, students profit from each other and need each other to perform some task. That sounds wonderful. Unfortunately, this is not always what happens and I think teachers need to be aware of potential issues.
I have to admit that my experiences with cooperative learning as a high school student have been mostly negative. There were a few good ones here and there, but most were pretty bad. Having learned this week in class how ideal groups are formed, I can see how my high school teachers organised groups. They applied the theory, but I don't know if they ever realised that they weren't getting the outcome they had hoped for.
Where theory failed
There was a fundamental problem every single teacher who tried to engineer perfect cooperative learning groups ignored: most of the people in my year who were more in need of help were people who didn't care about school work and were very happy with doing the bare minimum to pass. When they worked as part of a group, they wanted to be given the exact answers they had to fill in instead of being taught the process of getting those answers. There was no learning involved because they didn't want to learn. Making them work with their peers instead of alone didn't solve this problem. Because guess what? Students don't have any kind of authority over their peers if said peers just refuse to work. I sometimes get the impression that people who create education theories and guidelines have already forgotten what it was like to be a student and assume perfect situations that often aren't real.
I've read very utopic articles that talk about group effort and having a common goal and make cooperative learning sound wonderful. However, they don't address what happens when that common goal isn't common at all. They base the whole idea of cooperative learning on the assumption that a common goal exists. This is a huge mistake because the moment you remove that base, the whole idea crumbles. What happens when someone aims for a 9 or a 10 while someone else isn't willing to work to get more than a 5?
The result was that whenever a teacher announced that we were going to work in groups, but we couldn't choose our groups, some of us took it as punishment. It was essentially what it was since it inevitably meant extra homework. Those of us who were considered more able to give help knew that we were going to have to do the work of at least one other person and that was the best case scenario. The worst case scenario was doing the work of the whole group. And it happened. More than once or twice.
The hard truth is that group work often puts a bunch of students in a lose-lose situation, since they are faced with the choice of only doing their own part of the project and getting a bad grade or getting a good grade by doing the work of more than one person. They are either sacrificing their grades or their afternoons, evenings and even nights. Moreover, it punishes students for taking school seriously when they're placed in a group with people who don't have the same attitude towards school work.
Suggestions for improving cooperative learning
I honestly think everybody's experience with cooperative learning would improve a lot if group grades were removed. Instead, members of the group should be assessed individually. Then, the whole activity could focus on actually learning something and helping each other.
Also, I feel that teachers need to be prepared and willing to step in when they see that one person is being forced to do all the work. They need to make this clear and show that they are stepping in. Some students will thrive when they feel that they are a key part of a group project and that their contribution is important regardless of what their GPA has been so far, but not everyone will take that responsibility seriously. Learning from each other is great, but it can only work if every member of the group is on the same page when it comes to work ethics. Real life isn't a film where things magically work out.
I will try to make my next post more positive. I'm not a negative person at all and I am passionate about many things. Unfortunately, most of them would require a lot of imagination to be applied to teaching or at least to teaching English.
Were your experiences with group work and cooperative learning like mine? Were you lucky enough to be placed in groups with similar goals? Feel free to let me know in the comments.
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