Effective Strategies for Cooperative Learning.

Abstract

About 15 years ago one of the authors (RF) began to experiment with groupwork in his engineering courses. After making every mistake in the book (which he had not yet read), he recognized that there must be more to getting students to work together effectively than simply putting them in groups and asking them to do something, but he wasn’t sure what it was. Then, like so many of his colleagues in engineering, he attended a workshop given by Karl Smith, heard the gospel of cooperative learning according to Johnson et al., and was converted. Things went much better after that, although every course he taught produced additional items on his lists of things that work and things to avoid. During that same period, the other author (RB) was also using cooperative learning—first as an elementary school teacher and then as an education professor—and compiling her own lists of successful and unsuccessful techniques. Eventually the two of us combined our lists and began to give teaching workshops together, and at almost every campus we visited someone was using cooperative learning and had come up with a technique or pitfall that was new to us. We paid attention, and if an idea sounded plausible and was supported by experience we added it to the appropriate list.