Blog #6: Cooperative-learning, student-centered strategies (due Monday, 3/12/12 by 8 AM)

This blog task will be a bit different than the others. For this week's assignment all you need to do is to pick a cooperative-learning, student-centered strategy that you have never tried in the classroom before. This new technique could be taken from the links I passed along to you all last week (see below), from the Sharbaugh (1997) resource found on Drop Box, one recommended to you by your co-teacher, or one that you create on your own. For the actual blog entry itself, please just state which technique you are going to try out (obviously you do not have to write 300-400 words). There is no need to reply to a classmate's entry this week, unless you would like to.

You will then plan to implement this strategy in one of your lessons sometime in the next two weeks, after which you will comment on its effectiveness (or lack there of) for creating a student-centered classroom. Please do not feel a need to reinvent the wheel. Likewise, you do not have to use this strategy for the entire lesson. It can be incorporated in just the warm-up, as an extension activity, for a closing exercise, etc. Whatever you see fit. Feel free to adapt the technique according to what is best for your classroom, students, and the lesson. Again, after the two weeks time period, you will reflect on how this technique played out with your students.

Student-centered/cooperative learning links:

http://edtech.kennesaw.edu/intech/cooperativelearning.htm#activities

http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/cooperative/techniques.html

http://llt.msu.edu/vol3num2/onthenet/index.html

http://inet.dpb.dpu.dk/infodok/sprogforum/Espr25/Stenlev.pdf

http://www.jigsaw.org/steps.htm

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Stephanie Knouse on March 12, 2012 at 1:22pm

Good luck! I'm excited to find out how this has gone for your students in the context of your unit!

Permalink Reply by Stephanie Knouse on March 12, 2012 at 1:23pm

I'm eager to find out how this works! Let us know how you carried out peer-editing in class, as there are many ways to do this. I think your students will benefit greatly from this process!

Permalink Reply by Ben Campbell on March 12, 2012 at 12:23pm

So i think i'm going to try the group grid activity! (under graphic organizers...

http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/cooperative/techniques.html) I feel like introducing unit vocabulary could be REALLY REALLY REALLY boring so I think this could be an interesting way for them to work with unit vocabulary...However I like a lot of the other ideas as well so I might try more than one!

Permalink Reply by Stephanie Knouse on March 12, 2012 at 1:25pm

I agree; it's hard to introduce vocabulary and it can at times be boring. But, via this strategy, you make the students responsible for constructing his/her own knowledge! Let us know how it works for you!

Permalink Reply by Jessica Richardson on March 12, 2012 at 12:52pm

On Wednesday this week I will be doing a 4 person jigsaw activity with my classes about demonstrative adjectives and pronouns. They have been primed for this a few weeks ago when I mentioned them in class and had a short explanation, but they have no notes on it and there was quite a bit of confusion. Each person is assigned to be an expert in one area and teach the rest of the group. Then as we do a quick run-through to make sure they have everything in the notes, I will have one non-expert from different groups explain different parts of the notes to the class. That way students can answer each other's questions in group, and they have to make sure that everyone understands it well enough to explain it. We'll see how it goes!

Permalink Reply by Stephanie Knouse on March 12, 2012 at 1:27pm

Jigsaw can be a great cooperative-learning technique. Seems like you have this planned out well! Good luck!

Permalink Reply by Richard Barrett on March 24, 2012 at 12:11pm

These last two weeks, I've been able to use a modified jigsaw activity about three times, one time for learning the imperfect and twice for readings in Spanish, so I'd like to talk about that in my next blog entry.

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