Group Work that Works

Student Collaboration for 21st Century Success

Paul J. Vermette, Cynthia L. Kline

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351579933
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

Promote cooperative learning more effectively by transforming your classroom into a learning community. Experienced K–12 educators Paul J. Vermette and Cynthia L. Kline offer their Dual Objective Model as a tool for improving your students' academic achievement and problem-solving skills, while encouraging their social and emotional development.

You'll discover how to:

• assign meaningful tasks that require students to rely on one another;
• build efficient teams, purposefully monitor group dynamics, and assess group projects effectively;
• engage students in schoolwork while developing crucial career and life skills;
• motivate students to see the importance of personal and group responsibility;
• maximize the benefits of student diversity in your classroom.

Emphasizing teamwork, persistence, communication, self-regulation, and empathy in a complex, diverse, and technological setting, these strategies can be easily incorporated into any curriculum. The book is filled with vignettes and sample exercises to help you apply the ideas to your own classroom. Each chapter includes a list of "Big Ideas," which invites you to consider how these strategies can evolve over time.

Well-Structured Cooperative Learning

What? So What?

In this very short chapter, we intend for you to accomplish three goals. You should:

1. Be able to explain what effective Cooperative Learning looks like, and be able to spot commonalities across its various implementations;
2. Be able to describe the importance of fidelity to implementation protocols;
3. Be able to identify research-supported outcomes promised by the use of well-structured Cooperative Learning.

What is Cooperative Learning?

Despite the fact that much has been written about “group work,” “collaboration,” and “Cooperative Learning,” the major thinkers (Johnson & Johnson, 1987, 2009; Slavin, 1983; Davidson & Major, 2014; Cohen 1994; Kagan, 1992; Vermette, 1998; Myers, Bardsley, Vermette, & Kline, 2017) on this topic seem to agree on some basics of well-structured CL:

• Students work in face-to-face small groups (five individuals or smaller) to solve problems, create projects, master conceptual content, or analyze data and/or situations.
• The structure of, and the feelings within, the heterogeneous group must be geared toward an ethos of positive interdependence, a situation that demands that no one person can be successful without others being so as well.
• The teams are usually arranged by the teacher, and must be stable or what is perceived as “relatively permanent”; that is, they are not short-term groupings of mixed individuals to complete a temporary task but rather a unit that must work through numerous differentiated interactions over time.
• The effectiveness of the group’s internal interaction must be monitored and assessed and feedback must be offered by team members and the teacher.
• Assessment for, and of, learning must include individual and group accountability, so that success or failure is earned by the individuals and the team.

TASK: Is This an Example of CL?

Please read the following classroom vignettes carefully and decide, by categorizing them as YES or NO, whether they are, in fact, well-structured Cooperative Learning exemplars according to the conceptualization offered above.

1. —–––– 1. On Thursdays, Ms. Jenkins lets her 21 7th-grade FACS students work together on the week’s assignment if they wish to do so. From bell to bell, she “works the room” (Konkoski-Bates & Vermette, 2004), offering them feedback on their work and encouraging them to share their ideas.
2. —–––– 2. In Social Studies 11, Mr. Bautista (also Varsity Football Coach) has students assigned to their “base teams” of three or four. Every day that the class meets, the teams gather and share their ideas and make sure that everyone is learning the material for the Friday test. Each group that has every member score at 70 percent or better on that test gets a bonus: ten points for each member. He also gives out “interaction” awards, a five-point bonus to everyone on teams that he judges have worked well together as a “unit” all week. An additional point is given to everyone on teams with perfect attendance.
3. —–––– 3. Dr. Smith uses a lot of short activities during his 8th-grade science class. Today there were five such learning activities and he used a random number generator to create and vary the small group memberships that completed each of these tasks. After each brief activity, Smith asks one student from the entire class to tell what happened and thus inform everyone about his or her group’s procedures and results.
4. —–––– 4. Dividing the class into boys vs. girls, Miss Jones sets her 9th-grade ELA class up for a debate about gender and how it affects fiction. Each of the two groups (12 boys and 11 girls) will pick one representative and use the first 20 minutes of class to prepare him and her for the two-person debate that will occur during the last 20 minutes. These representatives then debate in front of the whole room, with much cheering and shouting from the two sidelines. All of the members on the team of the better representative will get an A for the task and those on the lesser will all get a C.
5. —–––– 5. In physics, lab partners (eight pairs and two groups of three) are gathered around ten stations in the classroom. They will conduct an investigation and record their observations and findings in the appropriate lab manual space. Near the end of class, Dr. Proctor will provide public commentary about their efforts.
6. —–––– 6. In Spanish I, Señora Palma assigns week-long teams made up of three students each and hands out the regular rubric to guide student–student interaction. From a list of ten activities, the teams must choose two to complete today. Every student must keep a (meta-cognitive) log on his or her thinking and make observations about peer partners. Palma will use an interaction rubric as a checklist while the students are working and she actually calculates a “contribution and communication” grade for every student in every marking period.
7. —–––– 7. Last week, individual students in civics class completed a project for which they designed a fictional future city in their local state. This week, they have been assigned to a three-person team and are challenged to mesh their city projects together to create a hypothetical future state that includes each of the three cities that have been designed by individual members. Details will be sought that reflect all of the concerns that municipalities usually encounter and which have been studied the past two weeks. There will be a 50 percent group grade for the completed project itself and individuals will also take a short answer test worth 50 percent of a unit test.

The yes/no categorization task that you just completed is built along the lines of suggestions from Bruner, Goodenow, and Austin (1986) about student mastery of concepts, a critically important learning task. Notice that the definition/description of Cooperative Learning was offered and then learners were asked to actively analyze new examples for “goodness of fit.” The use of non-exemplars (i.e. the items that were classified as “not CL” or “NO”) may have forced readers to think deeply and precisely and therefore helped clarify the attributes of the concept of Cooperative Learning.

Such analysis and reflection makes communication—or in this case, an understanding of the definition—more productive. This concept attainment process is very powerful in secondary schooling as mastering key concepts goes way beyond simple vocabulary building, because secondary education is (l) built around the content disciplines and their carefully constructed concepts and because (2) most of these important concepts are abstract in nature, classification activities such as this one are powerful team learning opportunities. (Try this yourself: ask a colleague to do the task we offer below and then compare his or her results with yours and discuss the results. That discussion will deepen the understanding of both parties.)

TASK: Concept Attainment

In attempt to further reinforce the importance of concept clarification in secondary education and to influence you in your attempts at effectively teaching content vocabulary, we offer several statements (a–f) for you to ponder and evaluate:

1. In geometry, if a student thinks all triangles are “right triangles” and that, therefore, the Pythagorean theorem holds for every triangle, he or she is plain wrong.
2. In global studies, if a student does not distinguish between the economic patterns of capitalism, socialism, and communism, he or she will be very confused by historical and modern events.
3. In science, there is a difference between mass and weight that many students don’t grasp and it hurts their understanding of scientific inquiry.
4. In science, teachers talk of bacteria and viruses: students need to distinguish them from each other and grasp the significance of their differences in matters of health.
5. In ELA, students frequently think that any word that ends in “-ing” is a verb, which is not true.
6. Many students use the term “novel” to refer to any book that they are reading or talking about; some books are non-fiction and, therefore, are not novels.

Note that these are very common misconceptions. Please do not underestimate how important it is to help students master the conceptualizations that are critical in the subject you teach. Misconceptions damage understanding—severely. To that effect, we should closely examine teaching that would fall under the concept label “Cooperative Learning” and return to debriefing the original task we asked you to complete.

Some teachers might think that all seven examples described previously are equivalent instances of Cooperative Learning, a result which might damage their ability to generate effective classroom structures in their own settings because they are not all CL.

Using the description of CL that was offered, we think that examples #2, 6, and 7 are clearly positive examples of CL: they meet each of the criteria listed in the description. We think that the other examples (#1, 3, 4, and 5) cannot be considered CL unless some changes are made in reference to the following concerns:

• In #1, students can choose not to work together and therefore can have no experience with teamwork or communication with more diverse people.
• In #3, there seems to be no individual accountability; students are not responsible for their own individual learning and conceptual growth (they must only complete a group project). Moreover, the creation of the teams seems randomized and very chaotic.
• In #4, the teacher has created a mess. The presumed classroom organization of “boys vs. girls” results in massive teams and reveals that there is little possibility of any meaningful learning for most students. Most students will be bystanders in the second half of class (or cheerleaders, not thinkers). Two huge groups segregated by gender with no structured interaction and a vague focus is a waste of everyone’s time. This will also probably entice youngsters into behavioral problems; this is a classroom management nightmare about to start.
• In #5, there is a possibility that CL will surface in this situation. Students are working together, but we do not know if the tasks they are completing are routine and scripted or actually constructivist and integrative in nature. The end-of-class assessment is not very productive unless the teacher has a useful system to gather and provide feedback to individuals. Science classes have used lab partners since the dawn of the discipline, but we are not sure how well-structured they are to maximize gain for both parties. Slight adjustments, like those offered in the next two chapters, would help this teacher experience a far greater level of success.

A Concept Test on the Application of Cooperative Learning

TASK: Mr. Vee

We wish to close this section by offering one more example and ask that you now apply (transfer) your prior experience with the ideas in the chapter to answer the following question:

How does the following example meet the criteria for well-structured CL?

In Mr. Vee’s class, students are placed into new three- or four-person teams on the first day of every month. Mr. Vee informs the students of his expectations for cooperation, communication, and respectfulness in their conversations and for thoroughness, accuracy, and reasoning in their end products. He describes team-based bonuses that are available to individual group members. He will be asking them to work in their teams in every class and he will be giving feedback on their performance in those settings. There will be weekly group projects, but no completely group-graded marks. Every student will produce a 50-word reflection about class every day and students are asked to produce a meaningful team name and icon that will be added to everything they create and design during the month.

We think that Mr. Vee demonstrates a thorough and effective use of Cooperative Learning in a secondary classroom. In fact, his methods foreshadow the Dual Objective Model for implementation as well. There is “high fidelity” in his design; that is, it aligns with all five CL criteria provided at the beginning of the chapter. This teacher has a tremendous opportunity to realize all the benefits that have been promised by the last 30 years of effective CL practice.

So how did Mr. Vee decide to structure his class as he did? How does he operationalize the process of carrying out Cooperative Learning effectively? What else might we want to know about his planning or execution as we try to plan for ourselves? Each of these questions is addressed in the next chapter as we begin to look at “how” CL takes shape in the classroom, and we introduce the Dual Objective Model as your guide.

Fidelity to CL criteria and following an effective execution protocol increases the likelihood that students will experience positive outcomes in their learning attempts. Not unlike any new undertaking, consistency and practice are key for both the teacher and learners, especially in the initial stages of employing CL. Some in fact, might question, “Why bother?” To that end, we acknowledge that the major reason a secondary teacher might take the time and effort to revise teaching practice is if doing so promises to deliver desirable cognitive outcomes (and/or readies their students for life beyond schooling). We hope to convince you of both as we continue.

In truth, the research base is chock-full of studies that show repeated academic or intellectual gains with the use of CL, most of it in the deep meaning type of learning that twenty-first century schooling expects from our students. (Interestingly, if the goal is just memorization by students, the gains generated by the use of CL are no worse than those of traditional teaching.) The excellence of Cooperative Learning for adolescents lies in its meaningful conceptual learning and deep understanding. Our own efforts, combined with those scholars that have preceded us, give us an expectation that the version of CL we have personally studied for a decade, the Dual Objective Model, will also systematically improve affective outcomes leading to more productive, skilled, and effective high-school graduates.

So now that you’ve encountered the “what” behind CL, let’s turn to the reasoning for “why?”

Cooperative Learning Outcomes

For each of the following outcomes, we will explain a bit about why the findings support the use of well-structured CL, and we will offer ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Meet the Authors
• Prologue: The Real Question: “Why Should You Read this Book?”
• 1 Well-Structured Cooperative Learning: What? So What?
• 2 The Dual Objective Model: How Do We Implement Well-Structured CL?
• 3 What Do the Students Do in CL Groups?
• 4 How Does the Teacher Build Effective Teams?
• 5 What Does the Teacher Do While Students Work? “From Well-Meaning and Intuitive to Systematic and Intentional”
• 6 How Does the Dual Objective Align to the World of Reform? Connections and Commitments
• 7 How Does the Dual Objective Look in Practice? Examining Examples and Exploring Challenges
• Appendix 1: Taxonomies of Affective Skills
• Appendix 2: Kagan’s Structural Approach