COOPERATIVE LEARNING (Cooperate to learn.

Learn to cooperate)
Introduction
-Inclusive school
The only way to teach different students in the same classroom is working in a
cooperative way.
There cannot be cooperation if the students that are different have been
excluded from the classroom, if the classroom is not inclusive.
For the development of communicative and social competences, it is necessary
to have a cooperation based structured classroom. These competences cannot
be developed in an individualist and competitive classroom.
Until Piaget (1969) and other psychologists focused on education, the school
has been focused on individualism, competitiveness and an asymmetric
relationship between the teacher and the students.
After Piaget, this has changed and it is clear that the interaction between peers
is essential for the development of the critical thinking and ideas exchange.
Aim: an integral education for all the students.
-3 main points:
-The personalization of teaching: The students characteristics have to be taken
into account when deciding what to teach and how to teach it.
-The autonomy of students: The more autonomous students we have in a
classroom the more time we can spend helping the ones that are not so
autonomous.
-The cooperative structuration of the learning: Structure the class in a way in
which the teacher is not the only one that teaches. Students are also able to
teach and help each other.

The logic of heterogeneity
Taking into account that most of the the areas of society are heterogeneous
(with different people), it makes no sense to have an homogeneous school (a
school where just a certain kind of student is accepted and the rest are
excluded because they are different).
The more different people interact between them the better it is.
Anyway, it is also OK to work in homogeneous groups in specific occasions.


From an individualist and competitive activitys structure to a cooperative
activitys structure
3 kinds of activitys structure: individualist, competitive and cooperative.
Cooperative activitys structure:
-Students work in small groups to help each other.
-Each student is expected to learn what he/she is taught and help the others to
learn too.
-Each student gets this objective just if the rest of the students also get it.

What we understand by Cooperative learning
-The members of a cooperative learning team have a double responsibility:
They have to learn and they have to help the other members of the team to
learn.
-The teachers use the cooperative learning with two aims: The students to learn
the contents and the students to learn to work in groups as one more content.
-The students will be organized in work groups in a permanent way, basically
for them to learn together.
-Cooperative learning is not just a way of teaching other contents, but it is a
content itself.
-All the members of a group have to work equitably and have to interact.

How to make the members of a group collaborate and cooperate between them
The main point is to make the students aware of the importance of knowing how
to work in groups, helping each other and cooperating between them. They
have to realize that the results they get are much better when they work in
groups than when they work individually. That way they are going to get an
excellent social competence.
Learning to cooperate and cooperating to learn has to be considered as one
more content, the same as maths or sciences.
How to make the groups
-Usually the groups have 4 members, 5 maximum.
-The composition of the teams has to be heterogeneous (Regarding interests,
genre, motivation, abilities, autonomy etc.)
-The teams are composed of 3 different kinds of students: The most motivated
students of the class thats it the ones that are willing to help the others (1
student per team), the ones that need more help (one student per team) and the
rest of students (two students per group).
-Usually the students work in heterogeneous groups but sometimes, when
revising something that has already been taught they can work in homogeneous
groups.
-The cohesion in the groups is an essential element for cooperative learning.