No Contest (51 page)

67. For example, Spencer Kagan has remarked that his “structural” version of CL “shares with David and Roger Johnson's approach the idea of giving teachers new methods so they can teach whatever they want to teach more successfully. It's curriculum free; the choice of a structure does not involve choice of any particular curriculum or curriculum materials.” (Ron Brandt, “On Cooperative Learning,” p. 10).

68. Mara Sapon-Shevin, “Cooperative Learning: Liberatory Praxis or Hamburger Helper?”

69. “I'm often depressed, however, to see these methods [Student Teams-Achievement Divisions and Teams-Games-Tournaments] applied to subjects that lend themselves more to discussion and controversy” (Robert E. Slavin, “Here to Stay—Or Gone Tomorrow?” p. 5).

70. Sapon-Shevin and Schniedewind, “Selling Cooperative Learning Without Selling It Short.” Also see Eric Schaps and Catherine Lewis, “Extrinsic Rewards Are Education's Past, Not Its Future.”

71. For one of many criticisms, see D. Monty Neill and Noe J. Medina, “Standardized Testing: Harmful to Educational Health.” For reactions to the prospect of expanding such tests, see Susan Chira, “Prominent Educators Oppose National Tests.” Some criticize these exams for various methodological flaws that limit their usefulness at doing even what they claim to do. I am more concerned with their inherent limits, the misconceived purposes for which they were designed. The only legitimate reason to evaluate students, I would argue, is to help them learn more effectively. Tests that sort children like so many potatoes—or that are intended to serve as extrinsic motivators for studying (or teaching)—ultimately interfere with a meaningful education.

72. See my book
The Brighter Side of Human Nature
and some of the more than 600 sources cited therein.

73. For that matter, the project also places special emphasis on the quality of the curriculum and on giving students more control over their learning—all of which have moved the project's designers away from relying on punishments or rewards. For details, see the sources listed in note 53 above.

74. See my article “Caring Kids: The Role of the Schools.”

75. Sapon-Shevin and Schniedewind, “Selling Cooperative Learning Without Selling It Short,” p. 64.

76. Nan and Ted Graves, “Sue Smith: The Child Development Project in Action,” p. 12.

77. Steven A. Gelb, “On Being Cooperative in Noncooperative Places,” pp. 1–2. For a useful guide to implementing college-level CL, see David W. Johnson et al.,
Active Learning
.

78. Daniel Solomon et al., “Creating a Caring Community,” pp. 13, 29.

79. See Paul Cobb et al., “Assessment of a Problem-Centered Second-Grade Mathematics Project”; and Erna Yackel et al., “Small-Group interactions as a Source of Learning Opportunities in Second-Grade Mathematics.” (The quotation is from the latter article, p. 394). Children in the project classroom were also less motivated to be superior to their peers—further corroboration of the argument that excellence and competition tend to pull in opposite directions. In third grade, project students were plunged back into the conventional textbook-based approach to learning math. Nevertheless, those who had spent the preceding year in constructivist, cooperative classrooms continued to score higher than the others on conceptually challenging tasks (Paul Cobb et al., “A Follow-Up Assessment of a Second-Grade Problem-Centered Mathematics Project”).

80. Most of the opposition to CL comes from individuals put off by the very idea of teaching children to cooperate. One academic psychologist told a reporter that cooperative learning should be opposed because it “goes against the American grain. . . . Education should prepare kids for life in a particular culture. In reality the name of the game is dog eat dog.” (Barbara Foorman quoted in William J. Warren, “New Movement Seeks to Replace Rivalry in Class With Team Spirit.”) The closest thing to organized opposition comes from advocates for special programs for “gifted” children, who bolster what they see as their underdog status by wildly overstating the popularity of CL. “In the [current] climate, marshalling an argument against cooperative learning is an unpopular, if not risky position” is how one writer prefaces her attack (Ann Robinson, “Cooperation or Exploitation?” p. 9).

81. See, for example, Samuel Totten et al.,
Cooperative Learning: A Guide to Research,
and the September 1990 issue of
Cooperative Learning
magazine. The March 1987 issue of the IASCE newsletter (precursor to the magazine) is devoted to the academic roots of CL, with articles on the work of Lewin, Deutsch, Dewey, and others.

82. Scott Willis, “Coop. Learning Shows Staying Power,” p. 1. The article appeared on the front page of the newsletter of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

83. Considerable research has demonstrated the academic and psychological peril in this widespread practice. Ability grouping does not respond to differences in what children can learn so much as it
creates
differences in what they
will
learn. (The indispensable source on this topic is Jeannie Oakes's
Keeping Track
. For a summary of other empirical research, see my book
You Know What They Say .
. ., pp. 163–66, 223.) The sensible response to tracking, however, is not simply to dump students of widely varying achievement levels into one classroom but to provide the opportunity for them to engage in structured heterogeneous interaction.

84. AAAS report excerpt quoted in Susan F. Wooley et al., “BSCS Cooperative Learning and Science Program,” p. 32.

85. “Small groups provide a forum for asking questions, discussing ideas, making mistakes, learning to listen to others' ideas, offering constructive criticism, and summarizing discoveries in writing” (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics,
Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics,
p. 87).

86. See Elizabeth Culotta, “The Calculus of Education Reform.” In a cooperative and conceptual approach to teaching calculus to students at Duke University and elsewhere, “much of their grade depends on co-authored written reports,” which means that “students have to collaborate during lab and outside class. And so they befriend each other” (p. 1061).

87. The recommendation quoted here is taken from a pamphlet entitled “The English Coalition Conference: Assumptions, Aims, and Recommendations of the Secondary Strand,” distributed by the NCTE. The 1988 anthology,
Focus on Collaborative Learning,
was edited by Jeff Golub and the National Council of Teachers of English Committee on Classroom Practices.

88. Helen Cowie and Jean Rudduck, “Learning from One Another,” p. 236.

89. For a sense of what is involved in helping teachers to become skilled in CL, see Susan S. Ellis, “Introducing Cooperative Learning,” and the entire Winter 1991/1992 issue of
Cooperative Learning
magazine.

90. Ron Brandt, “On Cooperation in Schools: A Conversation with David and Roger Johnson,” p. 15. For more on the subject, see the Johnsons' book
Leading the Cooperative School
.

91. Mary Male, “Cooperative Learning and Staff Development,” p. 4.

92. Yisrael Rich, “Ideological Impediments to Instructional Innovation,” p. 83.

93. I am borrowing, in the discussion that follows, from my article “Resistance to Cooperative Learning: Making Sense of Its Deletion and Dilution.”

94. Goodlad,
A Place Called School,
pp. 239–42.

95. Rich, “Ideological Impediments to Instructional Innovation,” p. 83.

96. Ibid., p. 89.

97. “The teacher in the cooperative classroom context will be more a facilitator than a director of learning. . . . Children make sense of the learning events together, within a mutually constructed experience. The teacher participates in this process, and as appropriate, models strategies and in other ways provides scaffolding to support children's thinking until they can function independently” (Nastasi and Clements, “Research on Cooperative Learning,” p. 126).

98. “Placing more emphasis on students' explanations necessarily requires teachers to relinquish some control over the direction the lesson will take. This can be a frightening prospect to a teacher who is unprepared to evaluate the validity of a novel idea that students inevitably propose” (James W. Stigler and Harold W. Stevenson, “How Asian Teachers Polish Each Lesson to Perfection,” p. 44). To the extent that this process of empowering students explains much of the resistance, it may be this, rather than CL per se, that is hard to do. Sharan has argued that successful cooperative learning is no more complex or difficult to bring off well than whole-class instruction; the fact that whole-class instruction is used widely does not mean it is being done well (see Sharan, “Cooperative Learning: New Horizons, Old Threats,” p. 5).

99. Sharan, “Cooperative Learning: New Horizons, Old Threats,” p. 5. Likewise, a British educator writes: “Unless we are prepared to recognize that what's involved here are radical changes in our expectations of pupils, our own role in the classroom, and our method of classroom management, small group work is likely to remain just another teaching technique, rather than, as it could be, a road toward new patterns of thinking and feeling for the pupils, or new ways for them to make sense of their world” (Alan Howe, “A Climate for Small Group Talk,” pp. 115–16).

100. Sören Kierkegaard,
Concluding Unscientific Postscript,
pp. 165–66.

101. Yackel et al., “Small Group Interactions as a Source of Learning Opportunities in Second-Grade Mathematics,” p. 396.

102. Eric Schaps, “Cooperative Learning: The Challenge in the '90s,” p. 8. Schaps describes his growing sense that something may be wrong even in smoothly functioning cooperative classrooms where children are “on task” and interacting with each other. “They aren't as careful, as serious, as probing as one would like. They are too casual and quick, and too accommodating, about deciding on their answers. And in the processing afterwards, they tend day after day to give the same, short, almost ‘canned' answers: ‘We shared and helped each other, and everyone got along.'” Many teachers, he continues, “seem satisfied with easy or predictable answers. Their questions do not often probe or challenge; their comments are often routine and formulaic.” If teachers and students were really exploring ideas wholeheartedly, there would be “more conflict, more frustration” (p. 8).

103. For example, see Nancy Schniedewind and Ellen Davidson,
Cooperative Learning, Cooperative Lives,
and Ebba Hierta,
Building Cooperative Societies
.

 

AFTERWORD

 

1. See Lonnie Wheeler, “No-Cut Policy Prompts a Lot to Cheer About,” and Michael Ryan, “Here, Everybody Gets to Play.” Of course, opening the cheerleading squad to all who are interested does not change what they are cheering about, namely, competitive triumph, but progress comes one step at a time.

2. See Joanne Kaufman, “Here She Is, Ms. Tiny Miss!” A full-page
New York Times
advertisement (on 20 September 1988) for the magazine in which this article appeared carried the banner headline: “You're never too young to learn that winning isn't everything. It's the only thing.”

3. See Gary Putka, “Knowing Pi Now Could Mean a Shot at a Varsity Letter.”

4. Walter Bonime, “Competitiveness and Human Potential.”

5. Dale Miller, “Creative Art vs. Competitions.”

6. James R. Austin, “Competition: Is Music Education the Loser?”

7. Dewitt Jones, “No Contest!”

8.
Teen Magazine,
“Compete, Don't Retreat!” The correct answers are those indicating a preference for being graded on a curve (because “it tends to motivate you to stand out from the crowd”), trying to outmaneuver friends for jobs and boyfriends, and so on. Readers who don't consistently pick these responses are chided for letting their “sense of team spirit slow [them] down.”

9. Associated Press, “Students Blame Stress Problems on Competition.” Also see Haibin Jiu, “Science Contest Pressures Kids Too Much,” which describes the effects of intense stress brought on by the Westinghouse science competition.

10. Reuters, “Fight at Exit May Have Slowed Escape from Jet.” Thirty-four people ultimately died in the crash, which took place in early 1991. A few months earlier, eight people died in another crash, this one in Detroit. The National Transportation Safety Board blamed that accident on a “lack of proper crew coordination” in the cockpit and suggested training sessions to help crews cooperate effectively (Lawrence Knutson, “Cockpit Conf usion Cited as Cause of Detroit Crash”). Robert Helmreich and Dean Tjosvold, both of whose work is cited elsewhere in this book, have independently conducted research on airplane crew coordination over the last few years.

11. “Human nature being what it is,” one article in
Working Woman
asserted, “experts warn against baring your soul to someone who is going after the same goals" (Holloway McCandless, “Taking the Edge Off Competition”). The psychological costs of perpetual wariness and concealment of one's emotions are conspicuously ignored here. Likewise, the possibility that a competitive work environment, rather than “human nature,” could be at fault—and might be changed—is never considered.

12. John T. Lanzetta and Basil G. Englis, “Expectations of Cooperation and Competition and Their Effects on Observers' Vicarious Emotional Responses.”

13. David A. Wilder and Peter N. Shapiro, “Role of Competition-Induced Anxiety in Limiting the Beneficial Impact of Positive Behavior by an Out-Group Member.” In this experiment, subjects were told that they would work on projects in small groups and that their work would be evaluated by members of another group. Some subjects were told that the other group was cooperating with them; others, that it was competing. When asked to describe one member of the other group (who had made mostly positive comments about their own group's efforts), those who thought they were competing responded more negatively to that person and were also somewhat more likely to see that person as similar to the other members of that group.