Cooperative or Not-So Much Cooperative

Throughout the years of being in school I have had many positive and negative experiences with Cooperative learning. When thinking of this assignment, my examples came from the more recent past rather than when I was in High School.

Positive: While studying abroad in London, my friend Natalie and I were assigned a group project in our Sociology class. The assignment was to pick a borough in London and study the aspects like culture, tourism, and people throughout different areas of the borough. We began by working together to visit the borough and collect our data by taking walks and counting people in the borough. We then decided to split the task to complete the project. Since Natalie is a great writer, she chose to actually write our findings and the final research paper. As Natalie wrote the actual paper, I did the research aspect of the paper because I love to research and get information, but do not enjoy piecing it together and writing. In this case my cooperative learning was great because we worked together to complete our task, but used the strengths of each member to complete it.

Negative: Recently I was put in a group assignment for my Winter Term pre-course for Australia. Our group was in charge of reading a chapter of a book, and reporting on the findings about Urbanization in Australia. We decided to meet a week before the project was due to start working. When we met, one of the guys in the group showed up, assigned us all a section to read and make powerpoint slides for, and then left. Our meeting was exactly five minutes and no longer. The night before our presentation we met again in the library. Once again we handed in our slides and the guy said we were done and everyone left. This left me stressed and worried how the presentation would go. As expected our presentation was not very functional and many items were repeated because as a group we did not take the time to work with each other and talk through items.

Cooperative learning can be something in the classroom that can go really great for some people, and be really terrible for another person during the same assignment. As a teacher, our goal is to make cooperative learning something that is beneficial to all. Using my good and bad experiences I can find ways to develop cooperative learning assignments to fit the needs of every student, and not just the students that enjoy working with others.