No Contest (39 page)

On the other side are those who see CL as part of a broader movement in education that represents a profound shift in how we construe and promote learning. Here children are seen not as passive receptacles for facts but as beings who actively struggle to make sense of themselves and the world around them. This they do, in large part, by talking to others. Group discussion is not a “bull session” during which students react to what they have already learned; this is where much of the learning occurs.

The teacher's role is to stimulate a child's curiosity, to facilitate the process of playing with ideas and constructing meaning, and to aid in the development of intellectual and social skills. The goal is to get the student to develop an intrinsic, enduring commitment to this process (and to working successfully with others), to take responsibility for her learning and her behavior. For this reason, children are
given
far more responsibility, separately and as a class, for making decisions and solving problems than is the case in most U.S. schools. I refer to this approach as the constructivist position.

The basic distinction I am drawing has been around for decades, but rarely is it brought to bear on the question of CL. It is not the only schema that can be used to distinguish various models in the field of cooperative learning, but it is a division of monumental importance. The fact is that some CL proponents differ from one another with respect to fundamental ideas about the purpose of schools.

Anyone who evaluates the behaviorist view must immediately concede that a sufficiently attractive reinforcement can get students to do almost anything in the short term. (This concept fascinates children, judging by the tendency to entertain themselves by speculating on how much they would have to be paid to perform various unappetizing feats.) What we care about, though, is the effect on motivation in the long term, once reinforcements are no longer present. Consider just one of many studies that speak to this issue: preschoolers who were praised or promised movie tickets for drinking an unfamiliar beverage did indeed drink more of it than those who expected nothing. But a week later, when the latter group liked the beverage just as much as, if not more than, they had earlier, the children who had been rewarded for drinking it no longer wanted to touch the stuff .
⁵⁹

Similarly, when children see schoolwork as a way, individually
or
collectively, to snag a good grade, avert a bad grade, receive a certificate, earn a popcorn party, win a contest,
^*
or secure the approval of a teacher or parent, they have been given no reason to continue learning (or cooperating) when these rewards are no longer available. In fact, the continuous presentation of rewards to students helps to explain the very absence of interest in learning that is then cited as the reason teachers have no choice but to use rewards. Much like competing in order to feel good about oneself (see
[>]
,
n
32), offering students extrinsic motivators to get them interested in a task is like giving them salt water to quench their thirst.

 

THE THREE C's OF COOPERATION

 

Someone who accepts the premises of behaviorism would argue that CL, like anything else, is dependent for its success on extrinsic motivators. Speaking from within the constructivist tradition, I want to indicate, by way of response, how CL can work effectively in the absence of these incentives. I will focus on three interlocking domains to which we must attend in order to maximize the benefits of CL—or, for that matter, any learning environment. Let us call them control, curriculum, and community.

C
ONTROL:
Adults who are routinely told exactly what they have to do at work and how they have to do it are likely to become victims of what is known as burnout, a vivid metaphor that suggests an extinguished candle or a dark bulb. Some become actively resentful while others just go through the motions of working in order to pick up their paychecks. Teachers, who know this syndrome well, do not always seem to realize that students are subject to it, too. Conversely, when students (or other people) feel a sense of control over what they are engaged in, they are more likely to find it engaging. Autonomy, then, is not simply an alternative to extrinsic motivators: it is far more effective than any such inducement could be at producing interest in learning, cooperative or otherwise. After all, it is the absence of felt control that, on some accounts, explains why rewards cause intrinsic interest to evaporate in the first place.

Teachers need to do more than minimize the use and salience of extrinsic motivators; they should affirmatively help students to become responsible for their own learning and relationships. When children were allowed to pick their own materials in one study, they produced more creative art projects than did those who used exactly the same materials, but had them handed to them.
⁶¹
A child who can make (teacher-guided) choices about what happens in his or her classroom is a child who will be less likely to require artificial inducements to learn and more likely to get hooked on learning.

One model of CL that takes the idea of autonomy seriously is Group Investigation. Here, students form inquiry groups based on what they want to know about a given topic and then make decisions together about how they will divide up the labor and conduct their investigation. Each group collects information and analyzes it, then prepares and shares a final report or innovative presentation that reflects what has been learned. Finally, each group contributes to the evaluation process, perhaps making up the questions on their unit that will be included in a classwide test, if there is to be one. The point is to “incorporate the evaluation into the learning process.”
⁶²

At both the elementary and secondary levels, this model has been associated with a higher level of academic achievement (along with other advantages) precisely because “it gives students more control over their learning.”
⁶³
Elsewhere, Shlomo Sharan, its cocreator, has described CL itself as exemplifying the best of the constructivist tradition:

 

Cooperative learning . . . gives students an active role in deciding about, planning, directing and controlling the content and pace of their learning activities. It changes the students' role from recipients of information to seekers, analyzers and synthesizers of information. It transforms pupils from listeners into talkers and doers, from powerless pawns into participant citizens empowered to influence decisions about what they must do in school.
⁶⁴

 

This is, to be precise, a description of what CL can be and should be, but not, alas, what it always is.

C
URRICULUM:
Many books have been filled with prescriptions for improving the curriculum used in various subjects at various age levels. I would therefore make only three points. First, when children are given assignments that stir their natural curiosity and are neither so difficult as to be anxiety producing nor so easy as to be boring, they generally do not require extrinsic motivators in order to approach them.
⁶⁵
(The corollary to this principle is that if students are required to fill in the missing words in an endless series of unrelated sentences or memorize the kings and queens of England, they may
have
to be bribed to do so.)

Second, a meaningful curriculum is a necessary and perhaps even sufficient way to draw children into CL without the use of rewards. “If the task is challenging and interesting, and if students' are sufficiently prepared for skills in group process, students will experience the process of groupwork itself as highly rewarding,” according to Stanford University's Elizabeth Cohen.
⁶⁶

Third, if we do
not
address curricular issues in the context of CL, we may doom it to failure—or, put differently, we may doom it to success according to the wholly inadequate educational standards we have increasingly come to accept. Apart from the use of rewards, one of the most telling questions that anyone considering the use of CL can ask is what children are learning in their groups. Some models are advertised as being adaptable to any curriculum.
⁶⁷
The soothing message here is not only that CL will work regardless of what is being taught, but that educators need not reflect on how challenging or valuable their material may be because students will benefit from learning whatever is presented as long as they do it in groups. Sapon-Shevin has wryly referred to this approach as the “Hamburger Helper” model of cooperative learning.
⁶⁸

If CL is not to become a technique for dressing up ground beef—and if schools are not to become outlets of a Mclnformation chain, as it were—teachers will need to provide groups with stimulating, personally relevant material that pushes them to engage together in higher-order thinking. Even the partisans of some extrinsically based models of CL concede that these methods are most appropriate for dealing with problems that have one right answer.
⁶⁹
The question, then, is whether we resign ourselves to the continued reliance on such tasks or instead use the potential heuristic power of CL as an opportunity to find things more worthy of our children's (and teachers') time.

Using cooperative techniques to have students cover the same boring, inconsequential, or biased material or to have them “get through” worksheets with more efficiency doesn't demonstrate the approach's full potential for changing what goes on in schools.
⁷⁰

Likewise, the potential of CL is lost if it is geared toward improving scores on standardized tests—or promoted and sold on that basis. The worshipful regard for these tests—and if this were not discouraging enough, the proposal to have schools
compete
to see who can get more students to blacken the correct bubbles with their No. 2 pencils—comes chiefly from people who are uninformed about pedagogical or motivational issues. Most educators, by contrast, know that these measures fail to capture what is meaningful about learning and have the effect of pressuring teachers to “teach to the tests,” forgoing potentially innovative lessons in order to prepare children for exams. Anyone who wanted to destroy what is left of rich, creative teaching—or children's love of learning—could do no better than to increase our reliance on standardized tests.
⁷¹

Of course, all educators ought to insist on a curriculum of quality and attempt to resist and reverse the diminution of schooling. But those who are associated with a reform as exciting as CL have a special responsibility to provide content worthy of the method.

C
OMMUNITY:
The assumption that students will work together only on the basis of self-interest and, specifically, only in the hope of receiving a reward for doing so—the assumption, that is, that no classroom environment could possibly develop norms leading naturally to cooperation—betrays a profoundly cynical view of “human nature.” Happily, it is a view that enjoys very little empirical support. Given the right circumstances, caring for others is no less natural than caring for oneself.
⁷²

A classroom that emphasizes and promotes the value of community—that has, in fact, been transformed
into
a caring community—allows positive interdependence to take hold. CL can thus become successful without promising each student extra points for helping someone else. This is one of the guiding premises of the Child Development Project in San Ramon, California, a comprehensive, long-term elementary school program that has achieved significant success in helping children to become more caring and responsible.
⁷³
Drawing in part from the work of that project, I have elsewhere sketched an approach that all teachers can use to promote a sense of community, the idea being to provide an environment that does not offer incentives for helping or sharing but encourages children to ask “What kind of classroom do we want to have?”
⁷⁴

Once again, an exploration of this topic takes us beyond its role as an alternative to the use of extrinsic motivators in CL. In this case, it propels us clear beyond cooperative learning (at least in the way the concept is usually understood) and into the realm of what we might call the cooperative classroom. Anyone who needs to be convinced to make such a shift should consider the predicament of the teacher who confessed that “she caught herself yelling at a group of students, ‘Stop helping each other; we're not doing cooperative learning now!'”
⁷⁵

I am arguing that cooperation must come to be seen as a fundamental orientation toward other people rather than a set of techniques that are hauled out for specific lessons. This means working to change the feel of the classroom itself. As one second-grade teacher (affiliated with the Child Development Project) put it:

 

You can't just teach Cooperative Learning as a separate subject that you just do for thirty minutes a day and then just treat the children differently the rest of the time. The whole atmosphere of the classroom from the time the kids get to school until the time they go home is based on the idea that you expect them to get along, help each other, be cooperative, [follow] all the same guidelines in everything they do.
⁷⁶

 

Notice that this does not mean instituting a circumscribed program of CL and passively waiting for its benefits to seep out and improve the dynamics of other interactions and activities. It means teachers must broaden their vision, rethinking the entire learning experience and working with students to fashion that experience into something that is cooperative inside and out.

Too much of American education consists of teachers spewing out facts and requiring students to spew them back; if the latter is done correctly, the transaction is pronounced successful. This goes on in elementary school (“Europe is a what, boys and girls? That's right, a continent. Very good.”), and it goes on in college as instructors reward polysyllabic conformity by playing a game that might be called Guess What's on My Legal Pad.
^*
The research and values that support the use of CL can be understood as an invitation to change all this, not to abandon the teaching of basic skills but to distinguish necessary skills from trivia and to embed those skills in the more substantive process of meaningful thinking.