Reflection about the presentation of the
group "The Differents":
The group started with presenting
their PLAN OF THE TEAM. Sergio's personal objective called my attention because he wanted to
"Learn for the others", which is hard to reach since every member has
the job to learn individually and share ideas with the group. They made a very
good introduction explaining that Cooperative Learning is based on
heterogeneous teamwork and is NOT supposed to replace individual work. I also
learned from their presentation that one big advantage of CE is: Different
academic levels give different answers to different levels in the same team
(base groups). The teacher can do this in from of workshops, providing material
for different levels – this could at last for a week. Our professor explained
us an interesting thing about multilevel
classes in which it is essential to look how to give answers to everybody.
Furthermore I learned that in a class of CE it is absolutely not necessary that
the children work in silence, there has to be a "natural" loudness,
which is obvious because: How are the children supposed to work in group,
without being able to talk to each other?
Another important thing to know is,
concerning the roles of the group that the responsibility of the secretary is
to take care that all members carry out their tasks and that all things are
done.
Reflection about the presentation of the
group "La Banda de Equipo":
Almost all members of this group had
as their personal commitment to speak more English or more Spanish, which seems
important to me because otherwise it would be hard for the group members to
communicate. What I learned is that the purpose of the PLAN OF THE GROUP is
that it has to be in written form, so everybody sees it. It is also a way of
having the objectives and later the criteria for the evaluation. Furthermore, I
have learned an important fact about the evaluation, or putting it more
precisely, the co-evaluation: One of the difficulties of CE is the trickiness
of how to evaluate the students. What if somebody has done more/less work? To
avoid this problem, it is important that a group makes its CO-EVALUATION that
will show the effort of every member in the group.
Reflection about the presentation of the
group "Regatonis Angels":
The presentation was very well
prepared and included very good ideas. Talking about the guide of CE, there was
one sentence that called my attention, which was: "Cooperative learning
creates successful people".
Also, our professor liked that idea and told us, that nowadays many job offers
require a master degree and in their requirements describe exactly the
cooperative skills.
In addition, I will explain four
different things that are essential for CE:
Jigsaw
During all the presentations we got
to know very well what this technique is about. First of all, the teacher has
to form base groups that have to be heterogeneous. To find out the different
levels of the students, the teacher can use the sociometric test, I will later
explain what that is. After that, the teacher "splits" the content in
various parts (there can be a maximum of 5 people in a base group!). Every
member of a base group gets one of the parts, without seeing what the other
members have, he prepares it and informs himself about it. As soon as all the
students have prepared their parts, expert groups are formed. In these groups,
the students exchange their ideas and become an expert in the topic they had to
study. Finally, the experts go back to their base groups to teach the other
members all the things they learned. The purpose of this is that in the end
everyone knows about everything. It is also important that every group has a coordinator; he takes care if everybody
carries out the task given.
Sociometric Test
The sociometric test is a technique
to obtain an objective picture of the relationships, which exist in a group of
people. It is normal that some will like one another, there will be some who
will be liked by many, another ones that may be disliked. This test should be
done at the beginning of a course and is very easy to do. The teacher has to
ask the students with which companion they would like to work with, so he later
can see, if there is exclusion in his class. Furthermore this test should help
the teacher become familiar with the levels of his students. It is necessary to
find out who are the ones who like to help and who are the ones that need help.
When it comes to form the group, there has to be ONE student with a high level,
TWO students with a medium level and ONE student with a low level.
Philosophy of the Class
The teacher has to make his students
realize the importance of CE and also put different norms that the children
have to respect. Here some examples: give thoughtful feedback; respect others;
on task, all the time; use soft voices; participate actively; stay with your
group; etc.
Webquest
WebQuest are activities for the
students to motivate their learning and higher thinking to solve a problem.
They can use Internet resources for their work. Teachers can create their own
classes, as well as share them with others. Students are provided with online
resources and are asked to use the information given to solve a problem. One
can design different units, either for only one lesson or for a longer period.
This program also supports the students thinking at the level of analysis,
synthesis and evaluation.
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