Grouping for Fun and Learn (Cooperative Learning)

By

Isna Fahimatul K.

PBI 5/ 40111014

            Oftentimes we ask for a help to make our homework or assignment. And even if we have a problem in our life, we also ask our friends to solve it. It seems that we can’t do everything by own, and it’s like we always need a help to do something. Insensibly we also share and learn each other when we have a casual chatting in the park, bedroom, or even when take a rest in our school. May be it is become a base of cooperative learning which is need to make some groups to solve a problem that teacher has given.

            Teachers who want to use cooperative learning effectively will treat their classroom practices on theory appropriate by research, whereas they can make a creation with that but still can build student’s skill and develop their knowledge. But, teachers must understand the nature of social interdependence (that is, cooperative, competitive, and individualistic efforts) to do it.  They need to understand that social interdependence theory is validated by hundreds of research studies indicating that cooperative has greater achievement, more positive relationships, and greater psychological health than competitive and individualistic efforts. Also, teachers need to understand the five basic elements that make cooperation work effectively: positive interdependence, individual accountability, promotive interaction, appropriate use of social skills, and group processing. Finally, teachers need to understand the flexibility and many kinds of cooperative learning, such as formal cooperative learning, informal cooperative learning, and cooperative base groups.

            Cooperative learning gives an opportunity to share evertyhing they known and learn something in a group. The Johnsons said that Deustch is a great inspiration in formulating the interdependence theory on cooperative learning. It was developed by Piaget and Vigotsky and the research was conducted by Slavin that has been inspired by motivational theories. Cooperative learning was unknown and ignored in the mid-1960s, but now it is accepted and used almost all around the world at all levels of education. Characteristic of cooperative learning is the existence of relationship among theory, research and practice. The interaction among theory, research, and practice is not only necessary for scientific progress, but also for more effective behavior in applied situations.

            Cooperative learning is used to promote student learning and academic achievement, increase student retention,enhance student satisfaction with their learning experience, help students develop skills in oral communication, develop student’s social skill and self-esteem.

            One of element in cooperative learning is Face to Face Interaction. It gives student opportunity to orally explaining how to solve problems, teach their knowledge to another, checking for understanding, discussing concepts is being learned and connecting present with past lerning using enjoy and casual chatting. We can use some activities to make it more fun, such as ; jigsaw, think-pair-share, three-step interview, roundrobin brainstorming and many others.

            Here some rules to play the activities above. When we use jigsaw, the groups are set up. Each group member is assigned some unique material to learn and then to teach to his group members. To help in the learning students across the class working on the same sub-section get together to decide what is important and how to teach it. After practice in these “expert” groups, the original groups reform and students teach each other.

            Think-pair-share engages three steps cooperative structure. Firstly, students individually think silently about a question given by the instructor. Secondly, they have to pair up and exchange their thoughts. The last, the pairs share their responses with other pairs, other team, or entire groups.

            Each member of a team chooses another member to be a partner in three-step interview. First step, each student interviews their partner individually by asking geting across questions. Second step, the students reverse the roles. And the third step, each member share their partner’s response with the team.

            In this activity, we need one person to become a recorder in each groups. But before we do Round Robin Brainstorming, teacher devides class into small groups atleast 4-6 person in each. Teacher poses a question with many answers give students time to think about the answers. After that, members of the team share responses with one another round robin style. The recorder writes all answer. In teams, students take turns responding orally, solving a problem, and breaking a problem down step by step.

The activities above can develop positive attitudes towards school and learning, and towards peers, and can provide abundant opportunities for learning how other people think, for developing language skills, and for learning how to solve interpersonal problems. Over the last century, many studies have been undertaken to assess whether learning within these groupings is more effective in particular forms (see, e.g., Pepitone 1980; the Plowden Report 1967; Slavin 1995). And the co-operative and collaborative approaches are generally more effective than individualistic and competitive approaches.

Many classroom cooperative learning tasks engage learners working together to complete a particular assignment or solve a specific problem; while other tasks require learners reviewing and retelling material already read or delivered in class to reach teacher’s goals of achieving a basic understanding of concepts and procedures,and then committing that material to memory. But a major challenge for teachers who want to use cooperative learning tasks that have cognitively advanced goals is how to promote the kind of group interaction required to achieve those goals.

Such complex learning requires learners to review or recall the previous knowledge they get, relating the problem to what they already know, using that knowledge to construct new knowledge, solve new problems, and treat exhaustively new issues.

Guided Reciprocal Peer Questioning is a cooperative learning strategy that has been developed for structuring the kinds of group interaction that promote higher-order thinking and complex learning (e.g., King 1989, 1990, 1994, 2006; King et al. 1998). The effectiveness of the strategy has been proven in research studies implemented in classroom settings.

In fact, research has shown that, even when teachers gives instructions to work collaboratively to solve the problem, learners generally tend to interact with each other at a concrete level in a specific step-by-step manner rather than at an abstract and doing some joking, in high level learners do not really need teacher’s guidance in how to interact (Vedder 1985; Webb et al. 1986). Learners also do not consistently activate and use their relevant prior knowledge without specific prompting (see Pressley et al. 1987). For this reason, classroom teachers and researchers have developed various ways to structure and regulate the interaction within collaborating groups so that learners are required to interact in ways that stimulate the cognitive processes appropriate to the learning task. According to Graesser’s constructionist theory of comprehension (Graesser et al. 1994), this kind of cognitive processing is necessary to constructing understanding and according to Kintsch’s (1988) construction-integration theory, such cognitive processing promotes building coherent highly-integrated mental representations.

In increasing student’s creation and knowledge, they must be need a motivation. So, what is motivation ? The Latin root of the word ‘motivation’ means ‘to move’. Hence the study of motivation is the study of action. Motivation may be defined as the degree to which individuals commit effort to achieve goals that they perceive as being meaningful and worthwhile. Motivation is the driving force, the energy that moves people towards their desired outcomes. When a goal is formed, a tension system is created in the person that motivates the person’s actions until the goal is achieved or abandoned.

Motivation is inherently emotional. Emotions may create motivation (i.e. desire, hope); accompany motivated actions (i.e. determination, stubbornness, excitement, joy, anxiety); and follow the success or failure of the motivated actions (i.e. pride, satisfaction, celebration). Emotions are contagious, it seems that it is transferred automaticly from one person to another. Neumann and Strack (2000), for example, found that when someone listen to another person read a speech, the tone of the person’s voice (happy, neutral or sad) can influence the listeners’ moods even though they are concentrating on the content of the speech and not on the reader’s emotional state. This contagion creates an emotional interdependence among the emotions of individuals in the same situation; that is, emotions tend to be correlated positively within most situations. Le Bon (1960) argued that not only emotions are contagious, but that in groups they become amplified so that the level of the emotion is intensified.

I think grouping on cooperative learning is a great method that we have to implement in our class nowadays. The effectiveness is more exist than the ineffectiveness. It can build student’s creation and fostering their knowledge with enoy and fun way. It also can make the learners involvement more active and they will amplify their motivation in group insensibly. And the book that I have read is really helping, because those book tell what teachers should do in managing the group, what is the effectiveness of cooperative learning indirectly and what can we get when we use cooperative learning.

Source :

Teaching English as Foreign Language 2 Module by Yuniar Fatmasari S.S. 2012. STKIP ISLAM BUMIAYU.

Gillies, R. M and Adrian F. Ashman. (2003). Cooperative Learning (The social and intellectual outcomes of learning in groups). New York : Routledge Farmer.

Gillies, R. M, Adrian F. Ashman, Jan Terwel. (2008). The Teacher’s Role in Implementing CooperativeLearning in the Classroom. New York : Springer Science+Business Media, LLC