No Contest (38 page)

A
SSIGNING
S
TUDENTS TO
G
ROUPS:
The size of CL groups will vary depending on the age of the students, their skill and experience working in teams, the type of assignment, and the time available. As a general rule, it is more challenging to integrate more people. As many as six students may be able to exchange information, but fewer—certainly no more than four—will be better able to produce a common product. Many tasks, particularly when attempted by younger children, can best be done in pairs.
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More complicated is the question of how to assign students to groups. Each of the most common methods has benefits and problems.

1. Letting students sort themselves offers a strong vote of confidence in their capacity to make decisions, but the temptation will be powerful for them to work with people they already know and like rather than learning to cooperate with those who are new to them. Moreover, some students will feel left out by a self-selection process, and the last thing teachers want is to introduce a competition for the most popular students, reminiscent of what happens when children choose up sides for team sports. One way around this, especially appropriate for open-ended cooperative assignments, is to let children form groups on the basis of the questions they are interested in exploring.

2. Teachers who construct groups may do so with an eye to making sure that each group includes students of different ethnic backgrounds and both genders. The advantages of CL that depend on working with those who are different are maximized when the groups are structured to be heterogeneous in this way.

3.    Students with different levels of skill can be placed together deliberately, at least for some tasks, so that effective helping takes place. (One researcher finds that mixing students from two distinct ability levels works better than combining those of high, medium, and low ability in a single group.)
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4.    Finally, students can be placed randomly in groups
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to avoid the contrived quality of assignments for heterogeneity. To make sure that each student has the chance to work with a variety of others, groups should probably be shuffled more frequently if assignments are random. Since students can belong to more than one group at a time, some assignments can last longer than others: they may belong to one team only for the duration of a short assignment, for example, and to another, more permanent, multipurpose “base” team for as long as a year.
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In any event, it is probably not a good idea for students to be able to switch groups just because they are having trouble resolving problems or getting along with their teammates. Such difficulties should be seen as learning opportunities—a chance to figure out (with the teacher's guidance) how to untangle conflicts; students should not be encouraged to assume that it is possible to bail out at the first sign of trouble.

T
EACHING
S
OCIAL
S
KILLS:
When students do not seem to be working together effectively, some educators are inclined to blame them for not being cooperative—or to give up on CL as unworkable. Others, though, reason that children may have been presented with a task that requires more subtle interpersonal skills than are currently in their repertoires. Many champions of CL emphasize that teachers must pay explicit attention to the phenomenon of working together—what it means and how it can be improved. The Johnsons, for example, emphasize that “collaborative skills are directly taught in classrooms where teachers are serious about using cooperative learning”—not only because these skills are a prerequisite for realizing academic gains but also because they are valuable in their own right.
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One teacher who recalled her frustration when she first tried to introduce CL to a class of sixth-graders concluded:

 

We must not . . . make the mistake of expecting that cooperative group behavior and thinking for oneself will occur in the absence of classroom instruction and practice aimed at these specific goals. . . . We can't
order
it to work; we have to
make
it work. We have to teach children the skills of working thoughtfully and responsibly together. . . . I have heard teachers give it up after a single attempt. . . . But these very same teachers would
never
say, “These children cannot read by themselves,” and thereafter remove any opportunity for them to learn to read.
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Social skills such as learning to listen carefully, to make eye contact, and to criticize someone's ideas without being insulting can be taught just as reading can be taught. Each lesson, in fact, can be introduced by laying out an academic goal (mastering the future tense in Spanish) and a social goal (helping everyone in the group to feel included). But I would offer two caveats to this approach. First, students of every age should have a role in deciding which social skills they could benefit from Working on. It is important to let the specific needs of a given class determine how these issues are addressed rather than running through a packaged set of topics (If it's Tuesday, it must be time to work on listening skills). Second, as I will argue below, in the long run we need to move beyond a focus on teaching discrete skills to individuals in favor of creating a caring classroom community as the context for all lessons.

P
ROCESSING:
A concern with
how
we learn, not only
what
we learn, requires attention after each lesson as well as before. A certain block of time—which, again, will vary with the age of the students and their experience with CL—should be set aside following the completion of a unit for each group to talk about how successful they have been at working together. They can be asked to consider whether everyone contributed to the final project or one person did most of the work, whether someone dominated the discussion, whether everyone felt free to present ideas, whether tasks were divided effectively. They can evaluate the process and, just as important, reflect on how it might be improved the next time they work together.
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If they decide they have done well, the team members should have the opportunity to celebrate their success, taking pleasure in what they have done and how they have done it.

I
NDIVIDUAL
A
CCOUNTABILITY:
Many adults react skeptically to the idea of CL because their memory of doing group projects in school is that they ended up being stuck with most of the work while their teammates loafed. (Two social scientists have observed with evident amusement that
everyone
seems to remember having been the one who had to carry the load; it is always “the others” who did nothing.)
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To be sure, if one person in the group writes the whole report or works most of the problems, the benefits of CL will not be realized. The question, then, is how to ensure individual accountability.

Let us set aside the larger issue of how teachers can best find out, under any learning structure, what children have understood and what they need help with. Instead, let us consider how teachers can make sure that every group member is participating in the CL process. The simplest method is to give everyone a test on all the material or to choose someone from each team randomly to explain what his group came up with and how they came up with it.

The problem with this solution is that it assumes “accountable for learning” means accountable to an external authority.
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It is taken for granted that the best—indeed, in many educators' minds, the
only
—way to make sure that children apply themselves to a task is, in effect, to threaten them with a poor grade or public humiliation if they do not pull their weight. These assumptions, in turn, reflect a set of beliefs about the nature of learning and human motivation that show up even more starkly in considering the basic issue of how to get students to work together.

P
OSITIVE
I
NTERDEPENDENCE:
We want members of a team to turn to one another for help, to exchange ideas, to feel a measure of group unity. One way to make this happen is to provide tasks that require students to work together toward a common goal. (By contrast, giving children individualized assignments and sitting them at a table with an admonition to help each other does not provide a group objective.) Another way to draw students together is to give a team only one copy of a story or assignment sheet and only one pencil.

These methods are not particularly objectionable, as far as they go. Two other approaches, however, seem to me more problematic, even though they are widely used by CL teachers. The first is to assign a different role to each member of a group, so that one student writes down all the ideas generated, another checks to make sure that everyone is participating and keeping up, someone else offers words of encouragement, and so on. While there are times this might be useful—such as when CL is still new to students—roles may quickly come to be experienced as confining. Spontaneous, cooperative interaction in the process of engaging with ideas is likely to be frustrated by a child's coming to perceive herself principally as the recorder or checker, a perception facilitated by teachers who have children wear badges to remind them of their responsibility. In truth, a student's primary responsibility is simply to learn in concert with others; anything that could eclipse that process ought to be used with extreme caution. In a study of thirty-three classrooms using CL, researchers at the University of Missouri observed that

 

in many cases, the designation of students as leaders, recorders, or materials managers seemed artificial. Students tended to switch roles when necessary and, unless the teacher reminded them, often abandoned roles altogether. Further, teachers often spent as much time reminding students of their roles as they did teaching a concept.
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The last method of creating positive interdependence is to use grades, certificates, gold stars, or other extrinsic rewards to induce students to work together. Thus, a team may earn a prize for a specified level of performance on a quiz, or part of one student's grade may be based on the improvement of someone else in the group. Models of CL can be divided into three categories with respect to this issue.

1.    Some—notably the “student team learning” methods developed by Robert Slavin and his colleagues—are fundamentally and explicitly driven by the use of extrinsic motivators. For Slavin, the very idea of a “group goal” means “working to earn certificates or other recognition, to receive a few minutes extra of recess, or to earn bonus points on their grades.”
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2.    Other approaches seem to reflect some ambivalence about the use of rewards, accepting them for promoting interdependence or boosting motivation, on the one hand, but expressing reservations, or at least not insisting on their use, on the other. The Johnsons endorse the strategic use of grades to ensure effective teamwork, calling this “one of the ways in which students are given the message, ‘We sink or swim together.'” This, however, follows by a few pages their suggestion that extrinsic motivators “should probably be removed as soon as the intrinsic motivation inherent in cooperative learning groups becomes apparent.”
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3.    Finally, some models explicitly repudiate (or at least pointedly avoid) the use of extrinsic incentives on the grounds that they are manipulative, destructive, unnecessary, or all three. Included in this category are the Group Investigation method devised by Shlomo Sharan and his associates,
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the version of CL used in programs implemented by the Developmental Studies Center in California,
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various models that grow out of a “constructivist” model of learning (see below) such as the collaborative learning approach favored in English-speaking countries other than the United States,
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the work of Nancy Schniedewind and Mara Sapon-Shevin,
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and my own writings.
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As I have already mentioned, a substantial amount of research in social psychology has established that when students see themselves as performing a task in order to receive a reward, their interest in that task is likely to decline, as is the quality of their performance over the long haul (particularly, but not exclusively, when creativity is required). Recall that one of the chief reasons that competition tends to be counterproductive is precisely its status as an extrinsic motivator; to use other such motivators for groups would seem ill advised, to say the least.

But let us put aside for a moment the relatively straightforward empirical question of what long-term consequences the use of classroom incentives brings about. The belief that incentives are
necessary
to promote interdependence and therefore learning
^*
—apart from relying on some very questionable assumptions
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—reveals a rumbling under the surface of discussions about CL. It is here that a great crevice between opposing approaches to learning itself is laid bare. Because CL has such potential to transform education and society—the power to let a new generation experience firsthand the possibility of achieving one's goals with others instead of against them—this division is worth exploring carefully.

On one side are those whose philosophy of learning is indistinguishable from that of mainstream U.S. educators except for the fact that traditional techniques and theories are applied at the level of the group instead of the individual. For them, cooperation is really a package of isolatable behaviors that are taught through the use of reinforcements. CL is a set of strategies that the teacher implements in prescribed ways
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to improve children's performance on whatever curriculum is already being taught. (The curriculum often amounts to a collection of information bits that are transmitted by way of primers, basal readers, and worksheets; the effectiveness of that transmission is then assessed by way of standardized tests.) It is taken for granted in this view, once the layers of assumption are peeled back, that human beings are inclined to learn and to care about each other only when they are given extrinsic incentives for doing so. These beliefs and practices are separable, of course, but for convenience I refer to this whole constellation as the behaviorist position.