blog 2 marzano ch 7

The strategy from marzano I will talk about is cooperative learning. I have used this once in my unit and I love the benefits of this. Marzano points out that it is important for students to be grouped based on abilty as little as possible. Some of the obvious disadvantages of homogenous grooping is that students know. They know who the smart kids are in their class and who the "dumb" kids are. Grouping them based on ability for say, a class activity, would be in my opinion a bad idea. For my group activity I split the class up inot groups of 3 randomly. I wanted to keep the groups small so they would work with each other. I think that if the groups get too large students will make their groups smaller by themselves by not always including every group member in a discussion or decision that the entire group is supposed to be in on. I am not sure how often my teacher uses cooperative learning strategies in his classroom but I can see that it would not be a good idea to over use them, as marzano points out. I could see some classroom management problems that coudl arise from over use. For me, I like to make group work a little more challenging than I work I would have the students do by themselves. This way students would need to rely more on each other to figure out what to do. For my activity the student were supposed to read an article summerizing the main points of one of the documents that influenced US foreign policy the most for around 20 years of the cold war. They were then supposed to examine 5 key events, polices, or conflicts and see where each point the author made about the soviets and communism was represented. Although I know I could have done a much better job explaining exactly what I wanted, I knew the activity would be challenging anyway. They were forced to work togother to get the assignment finished. One thing I did not take into account was the different interests of the students. Marzano points out the importance of considering things other than ability when grouping students such as interests. I am not sure if this would have been relavent to my activity but I could have allowed the students to choose their own groups. I chose not to do this because I was afraid of the management problems that could arise from this and this was only my 3rd day in the teaching role and did not feel ready to take on something like that.