Cooperative Learning As Brain-Friendly Differentiation

            "Done right, group work can harness the natural propensity of humans to interact," says Massachusetts educator Nancy Walser in this Harvard Education Letter article, "and - most important - make learning for a wide variety of students more engaging, memorable, and equitable. While it is more difficult to do than traditional lecturing, teachers say, most of the hard work is in the preparation, and the payoffs make the time invested well worth it."

Done right is the key phrase in the paragraph above. According to Johns Hopkins University researcher Robert Slavin, the key is having a group task and individual accountability. "When the group's task is to ensure that every group member learns something," he says, "it is in the interests of every group member to spend time explaining concepts to his or her group mates."

Walser believes that the instructional power of done-right small-group collaborative learning comes from three sources:

-   Identifying and working out different viewpoints;

-   Synthesizing and vocalizing one's own knowledge;

-   Extending one's knowledge through hearing the ideas of others.

This brings about what neuroscientists call "consolidation" - converting information that's rattling around in students' short-term working memory into their permanent memories. Consolidation is much more effective than "cramming", which is often done when students are bored, anxious, or afraid. Positive cooperative learning groups create the opposite atmosphere, boosting students' self-esteem, improving intergroup relationships, including English language learners and students with disabilities, and ameliorating students' negative attitudes toward school.

            Cooperative learning also reduces two factors known to inhibit learning - fear of making mistakes and getting discouraged. With the right pre-teaching and structure, says California teacher and neuroscientist Judy Willis, small-group learning decreases the fear of making mistakes in front of the whole class, which increases participation and perseverance with challenging material. Willis allocates 50 percent of classroom time to group work, assigning roles so each student is an expert at something - for example, stopping the group to summarize or making a chart for a class presentation.

            Willis is systematic about cooperative learning. She teaches group skills in the opening weeks of school (how to explain things, receive feedback, stay on task, encourage contributions, and monitor group-mates' understanding), plans units backwards ("What do I want them to know?"), pre-teaches skills (students can't join groups until they answer questions from their notes or reading), and keeps track of group and individual progress. "There needs to be accountability, [otherwise] some will goof off," she says. "Some will feel they have to do all the work - plenty of things can go wrong."

            Rachel Otty, a Cambridge (Mass.) high-school history teacher, is careful when she forms cooperative groups at the beginning of each year. She starts with the more distractible students and builds heterogeneous 3- or 4-person groups around them, making sure that each group has a member who is task-oriented, shy, and outgoing, and that all students have at least one person with whom they can work cooperatively. Otty also gives students a rubric explaining how individual effort and group work will be graded.

Teachers need to pay attention to the social and academic status of their students, says Michigan State University professor Helen Featherstone. High-status students may ignore or reject ideas from low-status students, and low-status students may assume that the "smart" students know better and pull back from participating in group discussions, even if they have good ideas.

            A crucial part of planning for successful cooperative learning groups is coming up with an "ill-structured task," says Walser. Student groups work best when they are asked to wrestle with a problem to which there is no right answer, that requires the use of higher-level thinking, and that forces them to work together to get the answer. Three examples:

-   Coming up with an equation that can be used to buy different lengths of shoelaces for different types of shoes;

-   Debating whether Andrew Jackson should have been impeached;

-   Reading the charges against men leveled by feminists in the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments and comparing them to statistics on the status of men and women in the U.S. today.

"Unleashing the 'Brain Power' of Groups in the Classroom: The Neuroscience Behind Collaborative Work" by Nancy Walser in the Harvard Education Letter, May/June 2010 (Vol. 26, #3, p. 1-3, 6) http://www.hepg.org/hel/article/465

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