Learning together
Learning, particularly learning within educational institutions, is a social phenomenon. Although the learning theories we have emphasized assume individual responsibility for learning, the social environment in which learners function can be essential in modeling, encouraging, and providing opportunities for essential learning and problem-solving behaviors.
Cognitive Apprenticeship
Educational reformers who want to increase the emphasis on thinking or inquiry skills have tried to develop strategies for teaching such complex mental behaviors. The notion of cognitive apprenticeship is one such strategy. Probably the most frequently cited example of cognitive apprenticeship is reciprocal teaching, which was designed to teach students how to comprehend written material (Palincsar & Brown, 1984). In this approach, the teacher works with a small number of students. Initially the teacher takes the most active role and models important cognitive behaviors. Because cognitive behaviors (mental processes) cannot be observed directly, important behaviors are defined in terms of behaviors that can be demonstrated: asking questions, summarizing content, identifying and clarifying difficulties, and making predictions.
In reciprocal teaching, the group reads a paragraph together. The teacher then models the target behaviors: asks the students a question, comments about something that seemed difficult to understand, or makes a prediction. Individual students then attempt these activities under the teacher’s supervision. Eventually the individual is expected to get to the point of performing all external behaviors and then only the internal equivalents.
The goal of cognitive apprenticeship is to help inexperienced practitioners acquire essential thinking skills. The social environment provides the opportunity to learn from more skilled colleagues and to share responsibility so that a demanding task does not overwhelm the learner. Critical to the approach are opportunities to externalize mental behaviors. Teachers and students describe what they are trying to do as they work on tasks that involve the essential thinking behaviors. The descriptions provide less experienced learners something to consider and model. At the same time, they allow the more skilled practitioners to evaluate and offer advice.
Authentic technology projects allow teachers frequent occasions to model learning and problem-solving behaviors. By their very nature, authentic technology projects are less predictable and more exploratory than typical classroom experiences. Of course, to engage students in such exploration, teachers themselves need to be flexible and open to new experiences. What personal experiences in learning with technology could you share with students?
Cooperative Learning
In cooperative learning, students work together to accomplish a learning task. They may accomplish this goal by motivating, teaching, evaluating, or engaging each other in discussions that encourage reflection. When all students contribute, cooperative approaches encourage active learning. Cooperative learning also typically encourages inclusion and promotes heterogeneity of participation with respect to ability, gender, ethnic group, and various disabilities. The nature of the task can vary from working together to prepare for an examination, to serving as a tutor to younger or less experienced peers, to completing a classroom project.
Here we are using the phrase cooperative learning in a formal way. It refers to methods of student collaboration that have been purposefully structured according to specific and clearly identified principles and have been thoroughly evaluated (for example, Johnson & Johnson, 1999; Slavin, 1991, 1996). Because not every situation in which small groups of students work together will be productive, we believe the details of how cooperation is structured and proceeds are important.
Experts in classroom cooperation (Johnson & Johnson, 1989; Johnson, Johnson, & Holubec, 1991) suggest that three tasks must be accomplished to ensure productive groups:
- Teachers need to help students understand what the desired skill would look or sound like. For example, the teacher may need to explain that a basic principle of working together is learning to criticize ideas and not people.
- Students need the opportunity to practice the skill. Role-playing is an effective way to learn social skills.
- Finally, students new to cooperative projects need to reflect on their use of cooperative skills. Students can benefit from the opportunity to discuss process skills. Did the group encounter conflicts as they worked on the project? Were anyone’s feelings hurt because someone misinterpreted the intent of an e-mail message?
There is no single cooperative learning method. Some methods are designed to help students master a body of factual material. There are certainly classroom situations in which this is an important goal, and cooperative methods that use group competition to push all group members to achieve have demonstrated value (Slavin, 1991). However, the cooperative methods of greatest relevance for this book are those that involve students in group tasks requiring both the acquisition and the application of knowledge and skill. Group investigation, a task specialization method that results in the production of group projects, is discussed elsewhere in the context of our more focused description of the completion of specific projects. As students work together on a project, they must discuss course content related to the project. As they interact, they acquire knowledge from each other, and they learn from the process of trying to put their ideas into words to allow someone else to understand them. Others in the group may see a problem differently or have a different explanation in mind for some phenomenon. The group process naturally produces a level of cognitive conflict that challenges the personal understanding of group members and encourages more active, self-regulated learning.
The concept of efficiency which we have emphasized in our discussion of learning experiences is helpful in considering the value and design of cooperative tasks (Kirschner, Paas, & Kirschner, 2009). The multiple sources of load we identified apply in group activities. There is a certain amount of overhead in cooperative tasks. Of course, management issues can be more of a challenge when students work together and there is always the danger that time will be lost to "fooling around". Division of labor represents a potential benefit of cooperative tasks. Often, division of labor eventually results in sharing what has been learned with group members to accomplish the task. This benefit is very similar to what we have described as teaching to learn. However, there are costs in time devoted to organization and coordination that must be invested and students must learn the skills necessary to work with others. The skills necessary to work collaboratively to accomplish task have been targeted as important 21st century skills (Trilling & Fadel, 2009), but it is still fair to recognize that the time spent in acquiring such skills is not available for learning something else. Kirschner and colleagues (2009) suggest that cooperative techniques be used in taking on tasks of sufficient magnitude that you would not expect a student to complete such a task by herself. This suggestion fits with our general suggestion that classroom experiences represent a mix of activities - individual and collaborative, direct instruction and experiential.