Blog #4 Cooperative Learning

Chapter seven of Marzano speaks of Cooperative learning. I feel that cooperative learning is a great strategy, because you are allowing students to work together to get the best out of their learning process. In blog four for me, I will discuss how cooperative learning during my unit helped students throughout the lessons. After every lesson that I taught, I generated an activity with groups. These groups would be on teams where they would cooperatively complete the activities that they were provided. It was really great watching them work together trying to solve problems and come up with answers. I was really glad to see students helping the students in the classroom with special needs. But, the cooperatively learning groups worked great. The first activity was difficult for the students because I don’t think that they had worked in groups very much and were shy about sharing answers or giving answer. As the unit progressed and we worked in groups almost daily, the students started to get comfortable with the other students in the class and by the end of the unit, students were sharing their answers in front of the entire book. I wouldn’t let students group themselves in their cooperative learning groups, because I could just see the friends being in groups and then those students who didn’t have many friends were left out. I grouped the students in various ways. One way was numbering, the other was folding a line. One way that I grouped students was by M&M’s. I passed out the candy with the right number of M&M’s of colors so that every group would have the same number of students. This worked great, because they got to eat their M&M after I grouped them. But all in all, cooperative learning worked great for me and I feel that the students really enjoyed it. Almost every day, students were asking if it was time to get into groups or not. The activities that I gave them were fun, but difficult for sixth graders. One activity I gave them was, they were immigrants moving to the United States from Europe and they were given situation cards where they had to complete answers and answer short answer questions to see the details about the people that they drew from the card deck. Cooperative learning worked very well with me and I will use it as many times as I can in my unit and throughout my teaching career.