No Contest (37 page)

By contrast, students in most American classrooms are eager to be free of them. They count the minutes until the end of the period, the days left before the weekend, the weeks they must endure until the next vacation. Perhaps this is because they hear their parents articulating similar sentiments about their work by thanking God for Friday. But maybe students genuinely find life at school to be a collection of tedious tasks and humiliating evaluations from which any reasonable person would want to escape. John Goodlad's mammoth study of more than a thousand representative classrooms across the country confirmed that “the kinds of classroom practices found most often were well liked by relatively small percentages of students”; the older the child, the less satisfaction was expressed.
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Of course, everyone is aware that most kids do not care for most aspects of school. Everyone is also aware that too many students are graduated without the intellectual skills or knowledge that we expect the schools to have provided; indeed, it has become a popular entertainment of late to describe how much students do not know. But rarely do we connect these two pieces of data. If children seem unhappy about going to school, we typically attribute this to the fact that kids just are wont to complain, that they don't like anything—or at least anything good for them. Then we insist that they had better get used to things that aren't any fun. (The premise here seems to be that the chief purpose of school is not to get children excited about learning but to get them acclimated to doing mind-numbing chores.)

It is also possible, however, to conclude that the problem may just lie with what happens in school rather than with some character flaw in the individual child. The extent of “on-task” behavior in a classroom, by the same token, may tell us something about the teacher as well as about the students. When a teacher complains that children are off task, our first response should be to ask “What is the task?” (In the long run, though, individual teachers probably are not to blame, given that decisions about what children must learn and how they must learn it are frequently made by administrators, school board members, parents, politicians, and faculty members at schools of education.) Moreover, the sharp line drawn between enjoying the process, on the one hand, and buckling down to learn how to spell, on the other, may reflect a philosophy of self-denial—or, more accurately, other-denial—that yields the worst of both worlds, since it often produces neither enjoyment nor effective results.

Goodlad ticks off what students are asked to do: passively listen to teachers' ceaseless talking (in his survey, the average teacher “outtalked the entire class of students by a ratio of about three to one”), submit to close and constant monitoring, work separately and silently on textbooks and worksheets, and so on.

 

How would I react as an adult to these ways of the classroom? I would become restless. I would groan audibly over still another seatwork assignment. My mind would wander off soon after the beginning of a lecture. It would be necessary for me to put my mind in some kind of “hold” position. This is what students do.
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More to the point, students come to find boring
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and detestable not only the place called school but the subjects taught there and activities such as reading and solving problems. This is why CL, by virtue of making learning (and what is being learned) more enjoyable, can also make learning more successful.
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8. I
NTELLECTUAL
I
NTERACTION:
Most important, CL succeeds because “none of us is as smart as all of us.”
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A well-functioning group—and, of course, not all groups function well—can be more successful, particularly on open-ended, challenging tasks, than any member of the group could be on his own. Ten-year-old Jason, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, captured the phenomenon as succinctly as any researcher has. The whole of the group truly becomes more productive than the sum of its parts.

Cognitive and social psychologists have tried to figure out just what it is about groups that accounts for the heightened quality of performance.
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At the most basic level, everyone benefits from the sharing of talents and skills and resources, a process that is either discouraged or prohibited outright in noncooperative classrooms. When the different members of a group work separately to collect information and think through a problem, then reconvene to exchange the results, each individual has access to everyone else's labors.

When one student catches on to something quickly and helps her teammate to understand, both tutor and tutee benefit. This, as Noreen Webb discovered in a series of studies, happens consistently, provided that the first student does not just announce the solution but explains how she got it and justifies her conviction that it is correct.
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As a group of British researchers put it, “Tutors may gain a deeper understanding of the material learned by virtue of having to teach it, and ‘learning how to learn' strategies may spill over into learning contexts other than the immediate learning task.”
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Researchers also have found that simply telling a student that he will be asked to teach someone else what he is about to read (as opposed to reading it in order to perform well on a test) leads to higher interest in the material and greater conceptual understanding of the subject matter.
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Beyond explicit tutoring, when people work in groups there is a tendency for one person's idea to evoke another idea from someone else. The second idea emerges as a reaction to the first and might not have occurred at all if its creator had been working on her own. In one study, fifth- and sixth-graders were given batteries, bulbs, and wire and asked to make a variety of different circuits so that the bulbs would light up. The students working in groups found the task more engaging, seemed to get less frustrated, and, by building on one another's ideas, created both more circuits and more unusual kinds of circuits than their classmates who worked individually.
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This phenomenon applies not only to ideas about the topic being studied but also to ideas about how to examine the topic (meta-level or second-order ideas). Group work leads to “more frequent discovery and development of . . . higher quality cognitive reasoning strategies.” First-graders, for example, were more likely to figure out the abstract categories to which words belonged (in order to memorize these words more effectively) when they worked together.
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Finally, CL not only permits conflict, as I mentioned above, but actually relies on it to some extent for its success. The process of finding that someone else thought a story's character had a motivation very different from the one you had inferred, or that another person assumed that dinosaurs became extinct for a reason that never dawned on you, nudges you to think through the problem in a new way, to take account of this brand-new perspective and try to reconcile it with your own.
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Notice that none of this analysis supports the idea that children should—or, with CL,
do
—become interchangeable members of a collective, relinquishing their selves to some amorphous blob of a group. It is competition that creates conformity (
[>]
); cooperation thrives on the diversity of its participants and the distinct contributions made by each. I do think teachers ought to make time for students to pursue independent work, too, but the more compelling point is that cooperative interaction may simply be the most powerful way to help each child find his own voice, make his own discoveries, devise his own connections to ideas and texts. “Talking is not merely a way of conveying existing ideas to others; it is also a way by which we explore ideas, clarify them and make them our own.”
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All of this impressive empirical evidence supporting cooperative learning—and, for that matter, the reliance on empirical evidence in general—needs to be placed firmly in perspective. Some researchers construct an imaginary brick wall, with those who respect the findings of science on one side and those who are in thrall to ideology on the other. But this dichotomy, which has its roots in a philosophy called positivism, confuses science with truth itself. It errs by overlooking the fact that all research, like all educational practice, is saturated in values, like it or not. But more than this, it suggests that there is something disgraceful about having and defending values; this is why many scientists label them “biases” or “ideologies” and treat them like last week's seafood dinner.

Having just finished reviewing the data that bear on the use of cooperative learning, I am obviously not arguing that it doesn't matter what the research turns up. It does matter, and it is with considerable relief that I can report that CL makes good sense when judged according to pragmatic and widely shared criteria. But the fact that I am relieved suggests that I am already drawn to CL because of other, deeper values that I hold. Frankly, it took me a few years to acknowledge this, to confess that I am not indifferent to how the evidence turns out (even though I hope I am able to assess it fairly).

Cooperative learning is worth defending even apart from its quantifiable consequences. Ideally, as Canadian educator Judy Clarke reminds us, the idea of interdependence is grounded in

 

the belief in every person's worth. This belief frames people in relationships of positive interconnectedness and therefore reflects an ethical orientation to life. . . . Without this moral foundation, co-operative learning may simply appear to teachers as a set of techniques . . . to “master” and file in one's repertoire.
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Without this moral foundation, CL likewise may appear to researchers as simply one arrangement among many to be evaluated dispassionately, much as one might test different thicknesses of glass for the classroom windows.

I believe there is something intrinsically preferable about having children work with each other as opposed to against or apart from each other. I am glad that I can reassure parents and teachers that it is a sensible arrangement from any number of perspectives, but I stand with Robert Bellah and his colleagues when they remark that

 

learning is never the result of the efforts of isolated, competitive individuals alone. . . . The evident weakness in American schools has much to do with the weakening of their community context. . . . Education can never merely be for the sake of individual self-enhancement. It pulls us into the common world or it fails altogether.
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Arguably, it
has
failed altogether. But while there is no shortage of critics willing to charge American education with failure, they often miss the point about what has gone wrong and why. The problem is not so much that students cannot find Turkey on a map but that they do not find themselves part of a community of learners; they do not find themselves, moreover, in a place where each person's worth is affirmed. The fact that cooperative learning can alter these sad realities is worth at least as much as anything the studies might tell us about achievement gains and the like.

 

THE PRACTICE OF COOPERATION

 

Cooperative learning takes many forms. It is present in a classroom where students edit each other's essays or help each other to develop and practice vocabulary or multiplication skills. It may mean finding an ad hoc partner with whom to have a quick exchange of ideas about evolution before resuming a whole-class discussion. Or it may mean that each student belongs to a permanent team of four that meets daily to make sense of current events.

A cooperative lesson plan may come from the teacher's notebook or it may be devised by the class. Perhaps the students find that their parents' talk about politics has made them curious to learn more about political systems in other countries, which they proceed to do with their teammates. Or maybe a student's announcement that her garage is now home to a litter of tiny, mewling kittens leads to an impromptu lesson on the subject, with children meeting in groups to read stories about cats, describe how a house looks from a cat's point of view, research specific scientific questions that they want answered (How are cats both similar to and different from lions? When do cats fight with each other? Do cats dream?) and then present their findings to the rest of the class.

All these examples share the premise that learning is an active and an interactive process. To that extent, it is decidedly not a silent process. This is one very practical reason that it is difficult for individual teachers to decide on their own to switch to CL; if the whole school has not made the change, the teacher in the next room may not understand the noise level. Furthermore, the Johnsons have proposed, only half in jest, that principals wander through the halls of their schools, listening at each classroom door. Whenever they hear nothing, they ought to make a point of asking the teacher, “Why isn't any learning going on in here?” As delicious as this reversal of customary practice may be, some trainers go even further, urging teachers to make sure their voices do not rise above and overpower the voices of students.

The latter idea, which suggests a pedagogical approach that would startle even some theorists and practitioners of CL, offers a useful point of departure for discussing different ways children might work together. Some of these issues are quite specific while others get right to the heart of a philosophy of learning; some are widely accepted among those who promote or use CL while others are controversial. The point here is to stimulate thought about the dimensions of cooperative learning, not to offer a comprehensive guide for implementing it.