jasmine-jie
Abstract: This article mainly integrates cooperative learning methods, the cooperative learning practice and the teachers’ role in carrying out this cooperative teaching method, which means that students work together in small teams to resolve a shared task into holistic picture. In addition, this article also points out the usual pitfalls teachers may encounter during their actual practice of cooperative learning approach.
Key words: cooperative learning, involvement, group work, discussion and experience
INTRODUCTION
In the teaching practice, we have already enjoyed the exciting achievements formed in the way of students’ excellent psychological quality and their social skills. As Liu Fuquan, a researcher in Tianjin Educational and Scientific Research Institute concludes in his famous work Introducing the Cooperative Learning: Cooperative learning has acquired satisfactory achievements with regard to some aspects, that is, the relationship between students and teachers and the partnership between the students and students, the development of the students’ intelligence and their creative cognition, the cultivation of their positive and upward emotion, the efficiency of the individual to individual communication skills, as well as the creation of the harmonious and congruous classroom atmosphere. However we also experienced the problems that come up with the carrying out of the cooperative learning, such as, the degradation of the students examination results, the bitter complaints reflecting from students’ parents, the unbearable pressure from the school teaching research leaders, just to name a few. In the face of so many negative feedbacks crowding upon us, can we just contribute all these problems to the inefficiency of the Chinese examination evaluation mechanism or should we avoid going through the devious and thorny road of quality education and return the way back to advocate and further undertake the written examination oriented education? Many doubts really come up with me as one of the so-called experienced leader in our school advocates that the quality education and the state-of –the –art cooperative teaching methodology is just one of the empty slogans that appear at this crucial point to meet the needs of the inspections from the super-ordinates or to tackle literally with the documents required by the education ministry.
Does cooperative learning really become inefficient to improve the students’ examination results? On the contrary, cooperative learning activities emphasize the dominant role of cooperative situation and take the initiative to absorb the advantage of the traditional competition and individual activities in its process of practice. Thus, students can acquire the knowledge in the cooperative communication, which has been testified to be much better than the individual acquisition.
I. BETTER ACHIEVEMENTS ACQUIRED AFTER THE CARRYING OUT OF PROPER COOPERATIVE EDUCATION
Linguists define cooperative learning as the principles and techniques for helping students to work together more effectively. Teachers, regardless of their educational backgrounds and their teaching positions, if involve themselves in the cooperative way of teaching and learning, will find that the power of the student –and –student cooperative learning can enliven the classroom atmosphere in the process of the English language teaching. Cooperative learning can enhance classroom instruction by providing the practical work experience that is relevant to students’ career goals. Cooperative way of learning and teaching appears to offer many benefits to all involved, for instance the students, teachers and the relevant institutions and so on. From my own experience, students can be rewarded with the following important benefits after long-lasting and assiduous work.
1 Students show more active involvement in learning English language in spite of their past achievement level or individual learning requirements;
2 Students show more responsibility to fulfill their own learning;
3 Students improve their cooperative skills as the group they form becomes more harmonious between each other;
4 Students adopt a better attitude toward learning English language especially with regard to the boys who always consider the language learning is not their cup of tea;
5 Students are found with better academic achievement with high velocity of improvement;
6 Students are identified with increased relevance of learning and good motivation to study;
7 Students improve their self-reliance and self-confidence and become more responsible;
8 Students are bestowed with more practice in their human relation skills and more contacts with potential modern society;
9 Students are better prepared to meet the demands of this modern society and become more adjustable to a new environment;
10 Teachers could have greater opportunities to observe and assess the students learning, whereas teachers are learning a new way to teach, students are seeking out a new way to learn.
As the diversity of students’ increases and the teaching challenges multiply, devoted teachers are undoubtedly seeking for better ideas and proper methods for meeting the difficulties and challenges teachers encounter in the students learning. Originally, we have tried several so-called effective methods to handle the newly arising difficulties in students’ learning. All the efforts we have dedicated and endeavored have practically proven to be in vain. Finally, we turn to the cooperative learning and teaching methodology, which provide teachers (including myself of course) effective ways to respond to the more and more diverse students and more and more unparallel English starting levels. In this way, we promote the students’ academic achievements and their mutual understanding, so that they can be more harmonious to work in the same group.
To be honest with the Chinese actuality, various family backgrounds, diverse educational foundations, and vast range of areas, which form the complex diversity of Chinese students, have silently spoken out the failure of the total application of traditional Chinese English methodology. Students in my own classes are from both the rural areas where students have hardly been in touch with English language learning, and the urban areas where parents pay special attention to children’ foreign language education. However, they are mixed together in the same huge classes. Obviously, it results in some kind of alienation between the rural students and the urban students as well as the difficulty of their mutual communication. What is worse, some kind of discrimination would arise among the relatively better students. All these prevent the development of their language learning ability and brocade the teacher’s teaching activities from further development and his/her covering of the teaching. Cooperative learning and teaching method presents a powerful educational approach to helping all students attaining self content academic and special social standard whereas cultivating their inter personal skills needed in this kind of special circumstance.
To form a strong relationship and partnership between teachers and students, and between students and students, there are three factors involved in the cooperative learning procedure. First, the collaborative group should be necessarily interdependent. Second, the fellow members in the same group should be interactive. Third, the small group members should be inter-communicative. These three factors are unavoidably critical to students involving in the cooperative learning and the teachers devoted to the cooperative teaching. With regard to these three factors involved in the cooperative learning and teaching, I personably agree with some linguists’ points of views. They figure out that the essence of the cooperative group is the development and maintenance of positive interdependence among team members. Students’ sense of the mutual connection can help them transcend the gender, economic, national and the cultural differences they may conceive in their communication. In this circumstance, students need the permission and the access to the class activities, which will be in need of the role of all kinds of students. In these activities, students must learn to depend on one another. They would face the failure if they isolate any one of them from the small group or if one of them does not take the initiative to take part in the involving activities actively. For instance, I designed a reporting activity in one of my classes. Firstly, I told the students to form a small group automatically with four members in each group. Afterwards, they should tell each other their birthdays and their personal information in the form of conversation. Finally, they were required to report the discussed information. In this simple cooperative activity, the relatively better students should take the initiative to aid the relatively poor students. The poor students could therefore receive the emotional and academic supports from the better students in their little group so that they can persevere against speaking obstacles and transcend the transient difficulties. Thus, students can survive in the fierce competition and fulfill impeccably the shared tasks assigned by the involving teacher. The consequence of this activity will ensure that all the students could find themselves positively linked to each other in the discussion with a supportive atmosphere. So that they can establish a relatively more equal status relationship with their peers regardless of their previous academic achievements and their original stereotyped prejudice. At that time when the environment improves, students will be better adjusted to engage in the cooperative activities on the foundation of their actuality instead of their conceived ability. Students in the relatively poor status will learn valuable knowledge and communicative skills, whereas students in the relatively better achievements could have the opportunities to interpret the important information accumulated from their fellow members into standard and understandable English in order to gain the appreciation from the teacher and other classmates. Both the victory and the accuracy of their presentation will give them invaluable motivation to take a more active role in the cooperative activities. They, in this kind of circumstance, will learn communicative skills that will benefit them socially and academically.
However, the cooperative learning and teaching methodology adopted by the teachers should ensure that all students could take the initiative to participate emotionally and cognitively in the brainstorming and discussion with their fellow members. Activities, fostered by the interconnected students and the devoted teachers, have been proven to be helpful and motivating for students learning foreign languages, which they will use to communicate in this modern society. When students participating in the completion of the shared and cooperative activities form a steadfast collaboration with their fellow members, the learning atmosphere becomes better adjusted to their actual needs and the communication, fostered by positive interdependence among them, enhances their morale of learning. Finally, better achievements will find their access to students’ ability in all round ways. Students may not know instinctively how to interact with others concerning they are still young. Cooperative learning coincidentally has the ability to tackle with this problem. It creates natural and interactive context in which students have the authentic reasons for listening to one another, asking questions and clarifying and the restating points of view. Reasonable group work encourages students to engage actively in the high-level thinking skills such as analyzing, interpreting, explaining, synthesizing and elaborating in English language during the cooperative activities. Therefore, we can say that cooperative learning strategies provide natural settings in which both the active and passive learners can derive and express meanings academically and personally. To sum up, cooperative learning can improve students’ initiative to involve themselves in the classroom activities.
II. THE IMPORTANT ROLE OF A TEACHER IN THE CARRYING OUT OF THE COOPERATIVE LEARNING
Not all cooperative learning and teaching methods are successful. Only the successful cooperative learning and teaching methods come into effect and become practicable finally. As we all know, cooperative learning takes many forms. The authoritative researchers in the US point out once the teaching method involves the small, heterogeneous groups working together towards a group task in which each member is responsible for the small portion of the outcome that can not be completed individually, it is called the cooperative learning and teaching method. So we can infer that cooperative learning and teaching emphasizes the cooperation and communication between students and students as well as the outcome of their discussion or cooperative work. However, we cannot deny that some teachers consider the new learning and teaching method construction as the external matter, that is to say, they concentrate themselves on the detailed appearances of their students behavior without consideration of their outcome and just take for granted that the embodiment of the new learning method is the noisiness classroom atmosphere and the superficial discussion and cooperation. Misunderstanding of the cooperative learning takes place frequently among our secondary school teachers. For instance, some teachers consider the superficial cooperative communication to be the magic weapon that could conquer any difficulty they encounter. The onset of students’ explorative desires hasn’t kicked off, teachers have been on their way to divide the students into small groups and require them to discuss the involving topic. Therefore, not all students have warmed themselves up to the state of cooperative learning, except some Straight-A students who can survive in any kind of circumstance. And the feedbacks of the poor students tend to be neglected. As some authoritative data shows, the so-called cooperative learning in English language acquisition adopted in the secondary schools of China generally share the same uniform. It’s always the teacher’s role to write the questions on the blackboard and divide students into several groups to work in the same meaningless group to talk randomly the involved topic already set beforehand. Such situation undoubtedly results in the some minutes of “disaster” of the discussion activities. In addition to that, the declaration of terminality comes out when students have just motivated their discussion initiative. Even if some top students could present very well and point to the gist of the topic, it is still not the outcome of cooperative learning and teaching, so to speak, such cooperation can not enhance the students essential cooperative skills and absorb indispensable knowledge from their fellow members. The orientation of cooperative learning, cooperative communication, and cooperative research, as far as I see, should point directly to motivate the students’ cognitive initiative, to develop students’ potentiality as well as cultivate students’ cooperative consciousness and ability.
As teachers, we should lead them to transcend the limits of individuality and guide them to achieve the super-intelligence of the cooperative work. Thus we can conclude that the cooperative development should base on the foundation of individual needs and their effective achievements can be acquired after the good guidance of teachers who have mastered the essence of cooperative learning and teaching methodology. Personally speaking, the teacher involving in the cooperative learning and teaching activities of secondary schools of China, is better to change the role of being a teacher into being a guide or adviser or participant. This is especially true for teachers who are undertaking in the work of teaching foreign languages. For instance, if we are considered to be a teacher, we undoubtedly are faced with the ridiculous task of finding things to do with groups of students who, it is pretended, all need the same instruction. In cooperative learning process among students, they must automatically seek out the questions to ask for suggestions from teachers with the collaboration of their fellow members. In this circumstance, the most important spirit students need before anything else is curiosity, whereas what a teacher is in need of a thorough and practical knowledge that he/she can articulate in a way that only the professional cooperative learning methodology master could do. In addition, we, teachers, should have a genuine interest in the language which could be easily sensed by students. We should be completely flexible and can respond instantaneously at any moment to any need of the students that arises. Maybe my point of view is, to some extent, extreme. Yet， I really sense that the reality that we might arrive in the near future. The teamwork in cooperative learning has dramatically changed the teachers’ role. Teachers should dedicate themselves to developing their professional skills and enriching their theory and philosophy of cooperative learning. They should tailor their skills to the needs of students in the specific linguistic and academic context. Teachers should advocate their cooperative learning methodology by their exemplary actions. They themselves should cooperate with each other and learn from each other to develop their cooperative skills. And these collaborative skills would give some opportunities for students to involve themselves more actively in the cooperative activities. Thus, give essential support for them to develop themselves.
At the onset of my implementation of the learning and teaching method, I set some useful communicative tasks for students to carry out with their partners or in small groups (2~4 members in the group) and I just remained staying in front of the teacher’s desk without any movement and didn’t show any enthusiasm or the interest to listen to what my students were talking about. The seldom involvement in students’ cooperative learning activities gave me the first failures. This is rooted in the non-change of the teacher’s role. The absence of correcting and commenting students greatly brocade the further development of my cooperative teaching approach. Thus, the absence of the feedback left my students very much in the dark about their ability and with no inspiration to improve. Then I designed some words of complement, the highlighting of only a few common errors, and suggestions that could lead to the significant progress to students’ subsequent continuation and discussion. The teacher’s role of cooperative learning and teaching approach should be a guide and a critic who could give students emotional support and could notice easily students’ advantages and errors so that give praise to their advantages and neglect flexibly their setbacks and suggest appropriately to their errors.
CONCLUSION
In the process of cooperative learning approach implementation, teachers more or less would go to some extreme. On some occasion we may make use of ridiculous errors from some students to remind others of not making the same mistakes. Actually it hurts the feeling of the involving students to make creative progress. Instead, we should create a relaxed and happy atmosphere in which students could predict that no one will laugh at them when they make errors and no teacher would criticize them harshly. Humorous teachers could develop the cooperative learning method based on respecting students, encourage students to respect each other in the group discussion and help them feel free to communicate and express themselves in the knowledge that mistakes are a normal part of this process, therefore, students’ obstacles in the collaborative work could be removed. Suppressing students’ errors while encouraging them to develop creativity in their group work, it is a very important factor for students to explore the creativity in their group work. As Michael Bond said creativity is a two- edge sword. Its benefits are obvious, but its process disturbing. The creative act requires time, resources for experimentation, a valuing of individual expression and a freeing of people from prescribed modes of thinking. Its favors are not bestowed exclusively upon those already designed as the leaders, scholars and the established artists. In consequence, creativity disturbs conservatives with its unsettling revolutionary capacity. For the sake of this, we know that as long as we insist on the endeavor to discuss the problem from fundamental level effortlessly to arrive at some kinds of original creativity and students are encouraged to transcend their own limits by involving in the group and absorbing from their fellow members, we will achieve the result beyond the individual contemplation and capacity.
To sum up, cooperative learning methods hold great promise for accelerating students’ attainment of high academic standard and the development of their knowledge horizon and abilities necessary for thriving in a non-native speaking world. However, cooperative learning is a kind of innovation; these approaches need to be tailored to the cultural and linguistic context among students. Designed and implemented by teachers who are skilled in their major and have a wide range of knowledge as well as dedicated to regarding adversity as a resource, so that cooperative learning and teaching methods can create supportive environment to enable students to succeed academically, further more, socially, enhance their social skills and improve their interpersonal communication.
REFERENCES
1. Mick Kavanagh and Don Snow, Talk about English Learning and Teaching: Nanjing: Yilin Press, 2002.
2. Federal Cooperative Learning Methodology ：(Federal Cooperative Learning Method Research Press, Publishing in 2004)
3. Wang Zhi, 200 Articles of Comprehensive Reading, Dalian: Dalian University of Technology Press, 2002.