The concept of cooperative learning has been around for decades, but it has never gained the same prominence as blended learning or differentiated instruction. While the reasons why cooperative learning has been less popular for so long is the subject of some debate, it’s undeniably a powerful and effective teaching strategy.
But what is the pedagogical basis behind cooperative learning? And how does it work in the classroom? More importantly, can cooperative learning work in a career and technical education (CTE) setting?
In this article, you'll discover the answers to these important questions and others. When you've finished reading, you should have a more complete understanding of cooperative learning so you can incorporate it into your instruction.
What Is Cooperative Learning?
Cooperative learning is based on group work, but it’s also so much more than that.
The core element of cooperative learning is to showcase the positive effects of interdependence while underlining the importance of personal responsibility.
This happens naturally in cooperative learning since students work with one another, but they all have a different task to accomplish or concept to explain. Students are able to demonstrate teamwork, but are still responsible for individual elements of a project that demonstrate their own abilities.
Cooperative learning introduces a social element to the classroom, allowing them to get to know their peers while internalizing important instructional concepts. This social interaction also helps students develop soft skills that will help them in their future professional careers.
What Should You Know before Starting with Cooperative Learning?
The key to successful and sustainable cooperative learning is keeping students on task.
As the teacher, this is where you fit into the cooperative learning experience. You’re not directly “teaching” when cooperative learning occurs. Instead, you’re ensuring groups of students stay focused and complete their assignments in a timely manner.
You know first-hand just how easy it is for students to get off-topic and start socializing instead of working together in a social setting. With that in mind, it’s crucial that you keep an ear to the ground for the entire classroom when they’re broken into groups.
While you can't be everywhere at once, it's still possible to effectively manage your classroom during cooperative learning exercises.
You can enlist the aid of another teacher, listen for the tell-tale signs of off-topic behavior (laughter, loud noises, etc.), or break students into large, easy-to-manage groups to monitor them more effectively.
You can also create a list of specific cooperative learning strategies that you want to use with your students. That way, you constantly have another strategy to pivot to for whenever your students wrap up one activity and move onto the next!
Plus, once you have those strategies in play, you can create a structured approach to cooperative learning in your classroom that makes it exceptionally hard for students to goof off, lose focus, or venture off-topic.
How Do You Structure Cooperative Learning for the Classroom?
Like any learning strategy, it’s completely up to you how you want to use cooperative learning in your classroom. However, it’s important to note that most teachers don’t start a class period with cooperative learning. The reason is simple: Students haven’t focused on the class subject yet, so they’re not going to be focused when they break into groups.
After all, maintaining focus is one of the chief obstacles in effective cooperative learning. If your students just come from talking to their friends in the hall to talking to their friends in the classroom, they’re not going to have the required focus to learn anything.
That’s why many of the teachers start class periods with bell work. It could be working through a lesson on a computer, completing a quick worksheet, setting goals for that class period, or anything else that helps a student think about the class. After bell work, teachers go in a variety of different directions depending on what they want to teach that day.
During early days of the semester, it may make the most sense to transition into a standard lecture that introduces a topic to students. But as the semester progresses, you may find that you have the opportunity to vary your instruction with different techniques to pique your learners' attention.
At these opportunities, you can jump to a cooperative learning activity. Students have heard the conceptual details of what they’re learning, and now they can apply those to a group activity.
That activity could be a discussion, project, exercise, or almost anything else. As long as your students are working together toward a goal, you’re on the right track!
To wrap things up, have student groups present their end results to one another. This is a great way to spur a class-wide discussion, allowing other groups to hear ideas that they may have never considered.
It’s also an excellent way to start an academic debate in the event groups disagree with one another. That may sound like a negative outcome of cooperative learning, but classroom disagreements are actually wonderful learning opportunities for both you and your students.
Students get to hear both sides of an opinion, which is always good. Understanding an opposing viewpoint helps keep students grounded in a debate and prevents them from characterizing or generalizing people who think differently from them.
You also get to hear the way your students think. This keeps you in touch with your students’ comprehension of class content, and it also lets you notice trend shifts, value changes, and even maturity in the thought processes of your students.
Finally, cooperative learning still allows you to stay in control of your classroom. You have the ability to start and end each aspect of the learning process, including presentations and debates.
Once you end your classroom discussions, give yourself enough time to recap the day. That’ll help students keep everything they’ve learned and accomplished in context.
You can use this process again and again over the course of the semester whenever you feel your students could use a break from the traditional lecture process to collaborate and reinforce critical concepts.
How Can Cooperative Learning Work in CTE?
While a lot of these examples sound like they relate specifically to traditional, K-12 classrooms, cooperative learning is also a valuable teaching strategy in CTE career clusters.
At its core, CTE is all about skills-based learning. That philosophy embraces hands-on learning, which lends itself well to cooperative learning. There’s no better example of cooperative learning than students working in groups to accomplish a physical task.
That task could be demonstrating CPR on a dummy for a health science course. It could be assembling a strut for a stress test in an architecture class. You could even go so far as to let a group of students diagnose a problem in a car engine if they’re on the automotive pathway.
If anything, CTE gives you more opportunities than a traditional classroom setting to embrace cooperative learning since you can use hands-on practice.
Still, that doesn’t mean you should design every single class period to revolve around cooperative learning. You can still lecture and provide independent study materials for introductory concepts. Then, when it gets to the point of practice and hands-on learning, you can turn students loose into groups.
This gives your students a nice mix of instructional styles that you may also find in a blended learning classroom. In that regard, cooperative learning is a great way to add some more diversity to your teaching to ensure students can learn the ways that work best for them.
Where Can You Start with Cooperative Learning?
Ultimately, cooperative learning is just one part of a well-rounded and diverse classroom experience. When you use cooperative learning alongside other teaching strategies like blended learning, differentiated instruction, and collaborative learning, you're able to provide your students with a varied classroom experience that allows them to experience content in a variety of engaging ways.
Cooperative learning is so important because it teaches students collaboration among other critical 21st century skills. Learning these skills in today's schools are critical to ensuring learners are equipped to be successful in their future careers and communities.
Do you want to learning more about teaching CTE students 21st century skills? Download your free guide!
You'll discover the value of these transferrable skills and how covering them in your regular classroom instruction helps ensure your learners' ongoing success:
