Tuesday presentations about cooperative learning (Paloma)

This Tuesday three teams make their expositions: Rigatoni’s angels, La banda del patio and The different. I think every group made a big effort on their presentation and work really hard to get the best of their teams. Something I have realized is that as the presentation have been going we have been going deeper in our knowledge about cooperative learning because each group had something new to add.

                As teachers who support cooperative learning we have to show our students the philosophy of the inclusive classroom, this philosophy says that EVERY student has the right to learn and to be different, the roles of the class have to be focus on this philosophy for example: ‘’respecting other in its differences’’ or ‘’help the others in their work’’. Those rules can be also about the class system like respecting someone when he is talking, whispering instead of talking...

                Last day we also learn about how (as a teacher) to make the based teams, it could be done by a sociometric test but also we could use the ‘’Three columns method’’ in which you decide which kids have more needs (third column, this has to be a quarter of the class), those one’s who are a little more advanced and could impulse the based team (first column and another quarter of the class) and the second column the rest of the class. Finally, the based teams should have one person of the first and second column and another two from the second one, this way every based team would be heterogeneous and diverse so the learning would go deeper and the cooperative learning method would start working. The sociometric is a technique of analyzing data that studies who the social connections are established, so it reflects the influence level and the preference bonds, for example, it would be done with two kinds of questions the knowledge questions (With whom would you like to work in a math assignment?) and affective one’s (With whom do you prefer to go on a excursion?).

                Furthermore, we talked about the method jigsaw, in which each member of the team studies a subtopic, then he or she goes with the other members of other teams who have the same subtopic as him/her, the share the information they know about this subtopic make a synthesis and become in a experts team, once they have summarised everything and know what are going to explain to their mates they come back to their based team and explain the their colleagues her/his information, then the other ones do the same so everybody explains their subtopic and listen to the others’ subtopic.

                Some of these groups included the Webquest which is a new resource for the teachers to introduce the children to a new task; I have found it quite interesting because this new resource has some parts as an introduction, the explanation of the task, the process... which I think explains the task and its goals perfectly (as it has the evaluation based on descriptions). This page provides the students with the bibliography they should use in their task which allows covering the danger of getting the wrong information on the internet (which is very usual actually.).