Cooperative Learning in Physical Education

A research based approach

Ben Dyson, Ashley Casey, Ben Dyson, Ashley Casey

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415667388
• eBook ISBN: 9781136478222
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Physical Education

Cooperative Learning is a dynamic instructional model that can teach diverse content to students at different grade levels, with students working together in small, structured, heterogeneous groups to master subject content. It has a strong research tradition, is used frequently as a professional development tool in general education and is now emerging in physical education.

This book defines Cooperative Learning in physical education and examines how to implement Cooperative Learning in a variety of educational settings. It explores Cooperative Learning in physical education from three main perspectives. The first, context of learning, provides descriptions of Cooperative Learning in different levels of education (elementary school, secondary school, and university physical education). The second, Cooperative Learning in the curriculum, offers case studies from teachers and researchers of their experiences of implementing Cooperative Learning within their own national context. The third perspective, key aspects of Cooperative Learning, examines how the different elements of the model have been foregrounded in efforts to enhance learning in physical education.As the only text to provide international perspectives, from eight different countries, of Cooperative Learning in physical education, this book is important reading for any student, researcher or teacher with an interest in physical education, sport education, sport pedagogy, curriculum development or methods for learning and teaching.

Part 1

Context of learning

1 Implementing the Cooperative Learning model in physical education

The experience of New Zealand teachers

Alan Ovens, Ben Dyson and Wayne Smith

Key terms: school-based research, change in pedagogical practice, student-centred pedagogy, continual professional development

In this chapter we discuss how we, a group of three university faculty, worked with a small group of New Zealand teachers to support their use of the Cooperative Learning model to restructure their teaching of physical education. By working with teachers, we were able to appreciate the complexity of contemporary educational settings and gain a valuable insight into educational practice. This collaborative approach provided valuable insights into the ongoing feasibility of using the Cooperative Learning model in physical education and the factors that enable and constrain teachers’ use of Cooperative Learning. We begin with an overview of recent New Zealand curricular reforms particularly with respect to how Cooperative Learning may be a valuable resource for such reforms and their efforts to support the development of quality teaching.

The educational context in New Zealand

Like education in many other Western democracies, the New Zealand education system has undergone significant reform over the past 20 years. Amongst the many changes has been the introduction of a new national curriculum, which introduced a radically different conceptualization of health and physical education (Ministry of Education, 2007). Under this new curriculum health and physical education changed in focus from a more traditional multidisciplinary approach underpinned by performance discourses and social development to one that included a more holistic approach, embracing socio-cultural and critical perspectives (Ovens, 2010). Teachers have been at the forefront of implementing these changes, with an expectation that they place greater emphasis on critical perspectives and inquiry-focused learning approaches.

Another aspect of the reforms has been an increased focus on teaching quality. Evidence of this has been the Ministry of Education-sponsored Best Evidence Synthesis project (BES), which aims to provide an ongoing synthesis of research information in a manner that can inform educational policy and practice, and has been central to this focus on improving teaching quality. The effect has been an increased attention on how teachers teach. For example, the New Zealand curriculum (NZC) states that, ‘students learn best when teachers: create a supportive learning environment; encourage reflective thought and action; enhance the relevance of new learning; facilitate shared learning; make connections to prior learning and experience; provide sufficient opportunities to learn; and inquire into the teaching-learning relationship’ (Ministry of Education, 2007, p. 34). Many of these teaching qualities can be found in the Cooperative Learning model (Alton-Lee, 2011), and led us to believe that Cooperative Learning as a pedagogical model would be appropriate to use in the New Zealand school physical education context.

Evidence gathered through the BES shows that ‘task design plays a central role in structuring and developing an effective learning community’ (Alton-Lee, 2003, p. 27). Mirroring the Cooperative Learning model, the BES suggests that an effective task design should recognize that the social and the cognitive are not distinct domains in practice, and therefore should be integrated and embedded in task design and classroom organization. The BES contends that the most effective and appropriate pedagogical approaches are those that create a learning environment that works like a community. This involves building a sense of cohesion, where care and support are generated through the practices and interactions of teachers and students. It is one in which students feel accepted and encouraged to actively engage in shared activities and conversations with other students. ‘The learning community concept emphasises not only the role the teacher takes in directly interacting with students, but also the key role the teacher’s pedagogical approaches have in shaping peer culture’ (Alton-Lee, 2003, p. 22). An active, engaged community learning approach is enhanced when teachers’ organization and task designs develop a learning community in which students learn how to support the learning of each member of the community. Difference and diversity become central to our understanding of community. Such a community recognizes and utilizes students’ skills to manage complementary problem-solving roles with boys and girls of different ethnicities.

The learning community concept places importance on the interdependence of socio-cultural and cognitive dimensions of individual accountability. It is one that encourages students to develop effective co-operative and other social skills to enable group processing to facilitate learning for all participants.

(Alton-Lee, 2003, p. 22)

The NZC and BES also support teaching and learning approaches that encourage reflective learners and a reflective teaching approach labelled ‘teaching as inquiry’ (Sinnema et al., 2011; Ministry of Education, 2007). A teaching-as-inquiry approach requires teachers to reflect on the impact of their teaching on their students (Sinnema et al., 2011). ‘The teacher uses evidence from research and their own past practice and that of their colleagues to plan teaching and learning opportunities aimed at achieving the outcomes prioritised in the focusing inquiry’ (Alton-Lee, 2003, p. 35). In the same way that teachers are encouraged to reflect on their practice, learners are encouraged to develop the ability to pause and consider the nature of what they are learning from an experience. The evidence suggests that teachers encourage this when they design tasks and create opportunities that require students to critically evaluate the material they use. In this research project we adopted a community-of-researchers approach that sought to embrace a collegial, inquiry-focused, reflexive teaching and teacher-as-researcher context (Stenhouse, 1975).

The above overview reflects how contemporary curriculum and pedagogical developments in New Zealand, and by inclusion health and physical education (HPE), provided a supportive environment to trial this Cooperative Learning research project. The questions asked in the project were not only if the Cooperative Learning model was appropriate in the New Zealand school HPE context but also what enabling and constraining factors impacted on its success in terms of student learning. The significance of the research was in gaining an understanding of the context-dependent complexities that impact on physical education teachers’ ability to employ the model in their school HPE lessons. In the presentation of the data and analysis of findings we seek to answer how the teacher-researchers adapted the model to meet their particular situated context. To this end, we highlight the situation-specific complexities the teachers negotiated in their implementation of the Cooperative Learning model in their school.

Methodology

The project employed the idea of a professional learning community to conceptualize how the project participants worked together to implement Cooperative Learning as a pedagogical model. The advantage of thinking of ourselves as a learning community was that it broke down the traditional hierarchies associated with researcher–participant relationships and respected the knowledge each participant brought to the project. Inquiry and professional learning were critical in this approach, and to facilitate this each participant teacher was supported to undertake action research into their own teaching (Elliot, 1991; Groundwater-Smith and Mockler, 2005). The university-based members of the school group acted as ‘critical friends’ to this teacher inquiry through workshops and visits. In this way, one outcome of the project was a series of individual case studies of the receptivity and innovation of each teacher’s involvement. A second outcome was the analysis of the collective experiences of the research group and the teachers’ experiences implementing the Cooperative Learning model. Regular meetings allowed the participants to share their individual experiences and engage in a collective analysis of themes and issues.

The project itself was divided into three phases. Phase one focused on building the learning community, as this was central to the idea that we wished to ‘research with’ teachers rather than do ‘research on’ teachers. A purposive sampling approach (Patton, 2002) was used to identify and select the teacher participants. We sought to work with participant teachers who were experienced teachers and capable of implementing a new pedagogical model within their teaching. We also sought teachers who were working with different year levels, from both primary and secondary schools. The teachers were identified through our discussion with a professional development support unit who worked regularly with teachers in the Auckland region. Once identified, the teachers were invited to participate through email.

At the start of the project our professional learning community was composed of 14 people: three university researchers, three teachers working at the primary-school level, six teachers working at the junior secondary level and one working at the senior secondary level, and a research assistant. Of the participant teachers, eight were female and two were male. This provided a group small enough to meet regularly and have everyone’s input into discussion while also providing a diverse mix of participants. One teacher, Kaye, had used Cooperative Learning to teach dance to Year 7 and 8 students, a year before this study. During the course of the project, three of the teachers withdrew. As part of the initial phase of the study, everyone was involved in a series of three workshops to outline the project, assess participants’ needs, deepen participants’ understanding of Cooperative Learning as a pedagogical practice and support the development of their individual lesson plans and units of instruction.

The second phase of the project involved supporting the participant teachers to implement the Cooperative Learning model in their own teaching as a case study of their own inquiry and reflection. The aim was for the teachers to implement at least two cycles of action research, which, in practice, roughly equated to a unit of work of four to six weeks. To facilitate this, each participant teacher was paired with a university researcher who acted as the teacher’s critical friend. The intention was that this pairing would meet weekly to discuss and plan the lessons, and set goals for the following week. However, in practice, this varied depending on the needs of the teacher and the exigencies of the unit of work being taught. In addition, extreme bad weather during the winter term meant that the project was put on hold for several participants until the spring term.

As part of their action research, the participant teachers were asked to collate evidence of their experiences with the Cooperative Learning model as it related to the pedagogical and content issues they encountered. Evidence collected and reflected on by the teachers could include lesson plans, teaching resources, examples of student work or peer observations. Selected lessons were observed by the university researchers using a Cooperative Learning verification sheet to check coherence with the pedagogical model. These observations, both formal and informal, were then shared with the teacher to help the teachers to critically reflect on their teaching process. In addition, each teacher was interviewed at the start of, mid-way through and at the end of the project.

The final phase of the project involved evaluating the key outcomes of the study. This involved both collective and individual meetings that were audio-taped and transcribed. For group meetings, the participant teachers were asked to share elements of their school-based experiences of the Cooperative Learning model, which were then collectively discussed by the group.

The researchers analysed all the data produced from the project using constant comparison and inductive analysis (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005; Lincoln and Guba, 1985) to develop and consider emergent themes. For this chapter, the data were analysed in relation to two questions:

(1) What are teachers’ perspectives of the feasibility of the Cooperative Learning model as a pedagogy for the New Zealand curriculum?

(2) What factors enable and constrain teachers’ ability to implement the Cooperative Learning model?

Findings and discussion

The project supported the participating teachers to implement the Cooperative Learning model into their own diverse teaching situations. In the following discussion we initially consider data in relation to the feasibility of Cooperative Learning as a pedagogical model for implementing the New Zealand curriculum. In relation to this, the teachers’ perspectives were grouped into two categories relating to personal philosophy and changing pedagogy. We then consider the factors that enabled and constrained teachers’ ability to implement the Cooperative Learning into their teaching.

Feasibility

Discussions with the participant teachers supported the view that Cooperative Learning, as a pedagogical model, was compatible with current educational reforms in New Zealand and more importantly their philosophical perspective. In the teachers’ view, the Cooperative Learning model provided a teaching approach that supported the ideas in the New Zealand curriculum, overlapped with many of the professional development initiatives undertaken in schools and resonated with teachers’ own personal philosophies about good teaching. In other words, in the teachers’ view, there was a strong coherence between the ideas being promoted in the New Zealand reform movement and this Cooperative Learning model.

Two examples of this can be read in the comments made by two of the teachers in their final interviews. For Sally, who taught Year 4 students in a primary school, the Cooperative Learning model aligned with b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Cooperative Learning as a pedagogical model in physical education
• PART 1. Context of learning
• PART 2. Cooperative Learning in the curriculum
• PART 3. Key aspects of Cooperative Learning
• Conclusion: Cooperative Learning in physical education
• Index