Thursday presentations about cooperative learning (Paloma)

                

This Thursday we finished all the cooperative learning presentations, my group did it the last and something that have really surprised me is that even while doing my presentation I was learning, as when we were talking about  the method Team Games Tournament we didn’t know that this method was bad-explained in the article so we explained it  like it was in the article, before we have already noticed that this game was pretty competitive and the teacher while doing the presentation explained us that the key of this game is that as a teacher you have to make as prizes as groups and those prizes are not the first or the second, those prizes are qualitative ones like ‘’The team which answer the questions more cooperatively’’, this is to say, the prizes rewards qualitatively instead of quantitative.

                In the ‘’Escuela de bocación’’´s presentation we learnt quite a lot too, they speak about the importance of the autonomy in cooperative learning, the team autonomy and each pupil autonomy, in cooperative learning the develop of the autonomy is essential because the teacher is giving the pupils too many responsibilities and they have to know how to handle it. Also, the teacher has to trust the pupils to give them responsibilities and the teacher has to give these responsibilities little by little, so they can get this autonomy, this is to say, the teacher has to be an scaffolding so first the students are learning to be autonomous with him or her but once they learnt it they are autonomous by themselves.

                One thing they talked and caught my attention was the multiple intelligences, for sure I have heard about them before but until this presentation I hadn’t made a connection between multiple intelligences and cooperative learning because one explains the other, one of the differences between students that cooperative learning thinks not like a difficulty but like an advantage is the multiple intelligences because as every kid learn in a different way we also have to take care of this and not focusing only in one kind of learning, taking care of the multiple intelligences would mean that everybody would have the same opportunities. Also this theory could take place in the TAI method because each pupil has its own task related to the way of her or his learning.

                They also talk about the method ‘’Group investigation’’, this method is about giving each team a subtopic for them to study and to present to the class, so once they have studied and develop it they make a presentation to the rest of the class of their subtopic. To make this method, the teacher has to develop with the team a plan of their work and established the tasks of each member and the objectives, once they have got all the information they will have to make a synthesis and then present it to the class, the assessment will be done with the teacher and the other students.

                This project about cooperative learning has allowed me to see personally and with concepts what cooperative learning was about, something I have realized is that all the presentation has enrich themselves with the others and finally the lasts presentations were pretty good because we have learnt from the others how to develop it. We have been able to go really deep in cooperative learning and know we are able to understand how it really works.