WORKING ON CL IN COLOMBIA. Some challenges and how to overcome them

In my previous posts, I have praised the multiple benefits of working on Cooperative Learning in EFL teaching/learning. The advantages of this strategy are undeniable, but what about our context? Is there any disadvantage of working on Cooperative Learning in Colombian Classrooms? The answer is pretty clear. Indeed, I have found myself struggling with CL. However, this does not imply that CL is inefficient or inadvisable in Colombia. On the contrary, I highly suggest Colombian teachers giving Cooperative Learning a try. Therefore, I want to highlight the most common challenges of CL and some simple ways to overcome them.

A LARGE NUMBER OF STUDENTS

A major disadvantage of Cooperative Learning, and of any other approach or method I have known, is the number of students. We all know it is not the same to work with 20 students than to work with 40. Even when you are working with small groups it is still difficult to assist everyone. If you do not find a solution to this issue, your class may become a mess, and your students might feel lost. Therefore, the best way to overcome this problem is to prepare your class meticulously and make sure all your students understand the main goal and the steps they have to follow in order to accomplish it. By doing this, you are avoiding unnecessary questions from your students, and they will be able to follow and complete the task in a more independent way. Another strategy you can implement is to assign roles to your students, making sure they will come up with their own solutions to continue their tasks without excessive teacher’s intervention.

SMALL CLASSROOMS

Clearly, most Colombian classrooms are really small for the number of students they have. When students do not feel comfortable in their environment, they might get anxious, distracted, and disengaged. As CL requires making groups, students need enough space for moving around the classroom. One solution I have found for this issue is the arrangement of the seats. Believe it or not, the way you organize the seats around the classroom makes a great difference in physical space. According to the number of students per group, I have organized the seats in a comfortable way, in which everyone can stand up or walk without any problem. If you consider the size of your classroom and take advantage of every little space you will notice a difference. However, there are many CL activities that allow you to go outside from the classroom and find a better space for learning.

TOO MUCH TALKING

Although Cooperative Learning intends to have your students discussing and participating in their groups, sometimes not class-related conversations can happen. Therefore, you as the guide and facilitator must be checking your groups and making sure they are working and following the steps for achieving their goal. You can also set expectations at the beginning of each task, explaining the moments when your students should be working and talking over their task and the moments they can have small personal chats. If some groups finish their task first, they probably may start talking with their partners. This chatting can distract other groups, impeding the flow of the class and harming others’ performance. To avoid this, you can bring to your class a small box or jar with several options for your students to do when they are finished with their work. The members of the group can select one paper inside this box and follow the directions. In the image you have an example taken from Pinterest, this way of avoiding distracting conversations is fun and engaging for your students, make sure you try it.

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COOPERATIVE LEARNING VS COLLABORATIVE LEARNING

We have widely discussed the concept of Cooperative Learning, its characteristics, and benefits in the EFL learning and teaching. However, when it comes to working together, concepts as Cooperative Learning and Collaborative Learning are mostly used interchangeably. Hence, it is essential to differentiate these terms and know the significance of each one of them in our classrooms.

To better understand the concepts Ted Panitz (1999) describes two simple definitions of these terms:

“Collaboration is a philosophy of interaction and personal lifestyle where individuals are responsible for their actions, including learning and respect the abilities and contributions of their peers.”

“Cooperation is a structure of interaction designed to facilitate the accomplishment of a specific end product or goal through people working together in groups.” (p.3)

As it may be perceived, Collaborative learning is not just a classroom technic, it is a way of living and interacting with others in a community, inside and outside the classroom. On the other hand, Cooperative Learning is focused on the accomplishment of a subject-related product. However, as learning techniques, these concepts have a lot in common; for instance, they both use groups, assign specific tasks, and have the groups share and compare their procedures and conclusions in the class. Then, where the real difference lies and why so many teachers prefer Collaborative Learning?

Rocky Rockwood (as cited in Panitz, 1999) states that in Cooperative Learning, it is the teacher who has the authority, who takes ownership of the task, and who guides the learning process. While in Collaborative Learning, the teacher transfers all the authority to the students who are fully responsible for their learning, actions, and tasks. Bearing in mind this definition, many authors have concluded that Collaborative learning is a more independent technique focused on the process, while Cooperative Learning is centered on the product.

Therefore, Cooperative Learning sets the basis for a student-centered approach, where the authority and learning are shared by the teachers and students. In cooperative learning, a common goal, structures/steps, and a subject based product are needed. As it was already mentioned, students work together in order to finish an activity or to achieve a common goal, this product has not the same relevance in Collaborative Learning.

However, according to Brufee (as cited in Panitz, 1999), these two approaches can be seen as linear processes. In this regard, Cooperative Learning is the first technique to implement in order to work with primary students and learn basic information and processes for interacting socially. Then, students may extend their critical thinking and reasoning skills by taking more control over their learning and social interactions while working on collaborative activities.

Now that you know some of the differences between these two concepts, would you implement collaborative learning with primary students? If so, how would you develop the independence and autonomy needed for this purpose? Do you agree with Brufee linear perception? Tell me in the comments.

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Cooperative Learning and the use of technology

Nowadays, technology in the English classroom is becoming more predominant. Educators have recognized the immediate power of technological tools and are implementing them more often in different subjects. It is clear that using computers, tablets, and smartphones has multiple benefits when learning and teaching a foreign language. However, how can we implement technology in a cooperative learning context?

According to Johnson and Johnson (1989), cooperative learning follows the theory of social interdependence. This theory states that there are two types of interdependency; cooperative and competitive. As the objective of Cooperative Learning is to work together in order to achieve common goals, cooperative interdependence must be the most important type of social interdependency that we want to achieve when including technology in our classrooms.

Although there is evidence that favors face-to-face interaction as more effective than online interaction (p.2), technology may be uncountable advantages in the cooperative classroom. Johnson and Johnson (2014) manifest that technology may expand communication, enhance the learning of basic skills, change the nature of multimedia projects, and involve students in simulations. Bearing this previous statement into account, the authors describe several ways in which technology may be implemented in the cooperative learning classroom.

Cooperative writing: Johnson and Johnson (2014) assert that technology facilitates the improvement of writing skills. Moreover, by using webs as Google Docs, students are able to work together as coauthors, commenting, editing, and discussing their texts. Another website you can use to promote cooperative writing is Storybird. In this web, your students can invite a collaborator to add new pages to their stories.

Cooperative reading: You can also make use of Storybird to enhance your students’ reading abilities. You can either use your stories for them to cooperatively read and comment or they can write and share, commenting on their partners’ texts. Johnson and Johnson (2014) establish that electronic devices as Kindle, allow learners of a cooperative group to share with each other passages, make notes for the other members, etc.

Reflecting on discussion: As the authors mention, technology is able to enrich discussions. You can use social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., in order to reflect on a class discussion or add information to it. Students can interchange ideas and create discussions in the Voicethread platform. This platform allows you to create a thread of comments that can be made in several formats like video, voice recording, and text.

Creating a website: Cooperative groups can work together in the creation of their own website. In these sites, students can portray their goals and purposes as a group, reflecting on their progress. Johnson and Johnson (2014) explain that adding portfolios of the best work of every member may increase positive interdependency in the group.

These previous ways of using technology in a Cooperative Learning classroom are just some ideas for you to implement in your classes. In addition, the authors exemplify other strategies and ways of using technology in multimedia projects, reports, communication and collaboration software, etc. If you want to know more about it visit the following link:

Johnson & Johnson (2014) Using technology to revolutionize cooperative learning: an opinion: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4195269/

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Cooperative Learning Activities

How can we as teachers adapt our activities to make them cooperative? The answer is pretty simple when you already know the principles of cooperative learning. Today, I decided to bring you 2 easy activities you can use with your students in order to foster cooperation, interaction, and learning. Remember that you only have to consider every student value and assign them a role in their groups, or let them decide the roles by playing games or by recognizing each other talents!

To create a cooperative task, activity or game all of your students should be participating, helping each other, and working on the task proposed. You just have to keep in mind the five elements of cooperative learning and everything would be easier. If you do not know them, I invite you to read one of my previous posts related to these particular and relevant aspects of CL.

Exquisite drawing

Without further ado, the first activity I have for you is called “exquisite drawing”. I am sure you already heard about the original activity “exquisite corpse”, but this time it is different. This activity is useful for reviewing vocabulary and enhancing your students’ creativity.

The first thing you have to do is to form your groups, you decide the number of students based on the topic and the drawing you want them to make. Each of your students will have to draw a piece of the drawing. If the topic is animals (for example), each group will have a little bag with several animals. It is easy to divide the drawing into 3 or four parts; top, middle, bottom/head, torso, legs, and feet (according to your needs). Then, the piece of paper you are going to provide for each group should be divided into three or four, accordingly.

After deciding which person is going to draw which part of the animal/person/object. One student is going to pick an animal from the bag, e.g. the student in charge to draw to top part of the animal chooses lion (this person is going to draw a lion head, while their partners wait with their eyes cover) It is important that the other students do not look at their partners drawings until the end. After the first person is done with the drawing, he/she is going to fold and hide the drawing, leaving a hint to his partner to continue (some lines where the neck ends would be helpful). Then, the first student covers his/her eyes and passes it to the person in charge of the middle part, this person is going to do exactly the same, but choosing another animal from the bag. At the end you will have something like this:

Maybe not as professional, but you are going to have a unique drawing that your students did cooperatively. Besides, they can also share their drawings in the classroom and make comments towards their partners’ pieces of art.  

Keep the balloon up

This famous game can be adapted to any class and lesson. You can use it to learn vocabulary, the ABC, numbers, etc. For paying, make sure that you have an outdoor space or a big classroom. You can do this activity with all your students as a group or in small groups the only thing you need is balloons. Your students’ job will be to make sure the balloon does not touch the floor, they can use their heads, hand, legs, feet to pass it to their partners. While they are working together not letting the balloon to touch the ground, they might be also counting how many times they have passed it without dropping it. They can also try to say al the letters of the alphabet or simply say the vocabulary they know.  Your students will have a lot of fun while learning and working together.   

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Classroom community and cooperative learning

We have been discussing the principles of Cooperative Learning, its characteristics and relations to Oral Skills. In addition to that, today I want to relate this approach to one of my main goals at teaching: the creation of classroom community. After some reading, I have discovered that these two concepts are closely related and that by implementing Cooperative learning, would easier to achieve the community I want in my classroom. 

To make clearer this relationship, let me introduce you to the concept of Classroom community. According to Ambrose Panico and Laurie Frank (2007), Classroom Community is a way of practicing peaceful conflict resolution that might influence students’ attitudes inside and outside the classroom. For reaching this community, it is relevant to celebrate and value the contributions of each member of the group, encouraging cooperation and social relationships. Although the creation of these types of communities requires time and effort, the results of it will be reflected on students’ attitudes towards their partners, their teacher, their classroom, and their learning. For working on classroom community, I am constantly focused on students’ strengths and talents, empowering them to value themselves as significant members of a community.

Likewise, Classroom Community might be beneficial to address the challenging behaviors that were observed in the classroom. By implementing routines and tasks that promote the creation of a Classroom Community, students might start taking responsibility towards their own acts and the consequences of them in their community.

For me, the creation of a place where students will be able to interact and share with their partners in order to express themselves, but also to listen and understand others is essential. For this reason, building a classroom community is imperative in this project for achieving efficient cooperative work, but also for fostering Speaking Skills. David Levine (2003) asserts that a classroom community is the creation of an environment where students can feel emotionally and physically safe, understood, and supported.  I aim to create a safe place for students to be themselves, listening to each other while working together. Therefore, every member of the community should have a role to play based on their talents and skills just as the roles in CL, considering the importance of addressing the value of each member of the group and the importance of positive interdependence.

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Cooperative Learning and Speaking Skills

It is well known that CL is a valuable approach to enhance your students’ Speaking skills. For this reason, I would like to share with you some of the advantages of using Cooperative groups to foster students’ interaction and develop oral skills in the foreign language.

Students usually express that speaking is one of the most challenging skill to develop in a foreign language. They are constantly afraid of making mistakes and feel insecure about their fluency and knowledge to achieve social interaction. This lack of confidence may be caused by the way they are learning the language. As we have already observed, there are several English classrooms that follow a traditional methodology in which students are passive agents in their learning process. In CL you are providing your student with the opportunity to be an active learner.

Moreover, by implementing CL, the common learning environment is transformed into a social and cooperative context where everyone’s role is essential to success. Hence, students have opportunities to interact and help each other, practicing their speaking skills while achieving common goals. Likewise, in cooperative groups students are able to exchange their ideas, thoughts, and perceptions. Finally, it is important to mention that aspects as shyness and anxiety can be reduced by eliminating the formal learning, where competition and grades are the principles of the class.

To exemplify the advantages of implementing CL in the foreign language classroom, Contreras and Chapetón (2016) conducted an action research study called Cooperative Learning with a Focus on the Social: A Pedagogical Proposal for the EFL Classroom, in a public school in Bogotá. In this research, you may evidence the impact of CL in students’ oral abilities in the foreign language, as the authors aimed to develop students’ oral interaction in the classroom. It is relevant to mention that, besides demonstrating the positive effect of this approach to foster interaction, they also found a great way to transform the context and the students’ attitudes towards their learning and their classmates. Therefore, we can conclude that CL is an approach that conceives the language as a social practice that might change students’ contexts and relationships while fostering language development.

However, I consider that CL is not a miraculous approach that works by its own in the transformation of traditional learning. We have to implement different strategies, methods, and tools that are closer to learners’ lives and realities in order to foster motivation and participation.

References:

Contreras, J & Chapetón, J. (2016). Cooperative Learning With a Focus on the Social: A Pedagogical Proposal for the EFL Classroom. How, 23(2), 125-147. https://dx.doi.org/10.19183/how.23.2.321

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Elements of Cooperative Learning and some strategies to work on them.

If you read my last entry, you probably asked yourself what makes Cooperative groups different from other learning groups. Here you have the answer:  Cooperative groups are different because of the integration of the five elements involved in Cooperative Learning.  It is relevant to clarify that these aspects should be seen as a whole and must be developed conjointly. Bearing this in mind, I will explain the 5 elements and some strategies you can use to work on them.

The first relevant element to achieve cooperative groups is the Positive Interdependence, for achieving this aspect, teachers must provide a clear task and group objectives. It is important for students to realize that individual efforts will not be enough to overcome the task and that they need the help of each one of their partners in order to succeed. For doing this, you can establish objectives that all of the members of the groups should accomplish at the end of the lesson. Additionally, you should create clear and short instructions for the students, it will be better to have them written on the board so students can review them and know exactly what to do next. 

The following element is called Individual Accountability, each member of the group will be responsible for accomplishing his or her part of the task, and the members of the group should be able to evaluate the process of the group and of each individual in it, creating strategies and solutions to overcome problems and difficulties in the group. One meaningful strategy to accomplish this element is to establish roles, allowing students to understand that they have a responsibility and that his or her group depends on the accomplishment of this task.

The next element is Face-to-Face Promotive Interaction, students should be providing feedback and encouragement to each member of the group. In this stage, learners should promote their partners’ success, helping, congratulating, sharing and backing them. I consider that if you want your students to present these attitudes, you are the first who have to model the behavior, encouraging, congratulating, and helping your students.

 The next element is called Appropriate Use of Collaborative Skills. Students should develop leadership, decision-making, communication, and conflict management skills in order to achieve the group objectives. Working on this element has been much more difficult than the others. However, I started to establish expectations at the beginning of the lessons and students seem to understand what they should and should not do when working together. Although this strategy requires time, it is worth it. You can use 15 minutes at the beginning of the class to review Collaborative Skills.

Finally, the last element is called Group Processing, in which students will assess their progress in relation to the group objectives established at the beginning, they should identify negative and positive actions to improve their development as a group and propose strategies to work more efficiently in next opportunities. At the end of each lesson, students review the objectives and make sure that each student has achieved them. In addition, students reflect the positive and negative aspects of working together, they can discuss or write their ideas down. 

There are several ways in which you can work on these elements. For example, the way you provide materials and how it promotes cooperation and sharing. Moreover, you have to consider that the activities you propose should be designed for giving each student a responsibility or role.

 I am sure that while reading this entry you have come with multiple ideas for working on these elements, please let me know on the comments below what strategies would you use.

References:
Johnson, D., Johnson R. & Holubec, E. (1994) Cooperative Learning in the Classroom. Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

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Why Cooperative Learning?

As a first step to introduce you to this blog, I will briefly describe the most relevant aspects of Cooperative Learning. As you should know, this approach has been widely explored in order to redirect teaching practices based on individualistic learning, in which educators’ role was the center of the learning process. By implementing CL, I expect to give students more autonomy and responsibility towards their actions and their learning process. In addition, I aim to foster students’ oral interaction and to defuse some challenging behaviors that I have observed in previous opportunities.

Cohen, Brody and Shevin (2004), assert that complete individualization is not a practical solution to work on all students’ needs in a particular classroom. One of the main advantages of CL is that it allows students to work together and carry out the role of teacher and of learner, recognizing and respecting each other’s skills and learning styles. In this proposal, students are working together to achieve particular goals that are proposed at the beginning of the lessons, they are also following different roles based on their specific skills and preferences. By doing this, students might acknowledge and respect each other’s differences, weaknesses and strengths.

Furthermore, Johnson, Johnson, and Holubec (1999), affirm that the exceptional performance in the classroom depends on the cooperative efforts of a group and not on the individualistic and competitive attitude of some learners. Students must actively participate in their learning process, and the success of this participation is closely related to teamwork and cooperative learning. These ideas certainly contrast with the traditional competitive classroom, in which students are usually working individually, intending to reach academic objectives. For achieving a CL environment with my students I am adopting the five key elements of cooperative learning that I will be explaining in my next entry.

In the following video you may find strategies and examples of Cooperative Learning.

References:

Cohen, E., Brody, C., Shevin, M. (2004) Teaching Cooperative Learning: The challenge for Teacher Education. State University of New York Press.

Johnson, D., Johnson R. & Holubec, E. (1994) Cooperative Learning in the Classroom. Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

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