Category: showcase

The following are my comments to my peers’ posts.

Cooperative/Collaborative Learning – Post #2

Hello Stephanie, I read your post about cooperative learning, and I totally agree with you that group work is used a lot in schools, especially during online live lectures. During Covid-19 with virtual learning, I feel that most of us mute microphones and turn off cameras while listening to live online classes, which lack the sense of interactivity. Virtual group work helps us make connections and interact with each other and focus on class material. If I got difficulties, I asked and shared my thoughts in the group before asking the teachers for all my courses. In EDCI 335, the Learning Design Blueprint assignment was a group project that involved cooperative learning. During this opportunity, I had a chance to meet new peers online via group meetings. In the meetings, I listened to different perspectives from others when we discussed the topic and negotiated the solution, and then compared them with my idea. In this way, it would improve my critical thinking and deeper understanding. Also, a group meeting is the best way for me as a second language learner to increase my communication and social skills when we intact with each other. A connection between your post and mine is the example of cooperative learning. You mentioned ‘Think-Pair-Share’, and mine is the ‘Jigsaw Model.’ Both of them are typical representatives of the cooperative learning method.

Additionally, I really like the YouTube video that you mentioned in your post – Collaborative Learning Builds Deeper Understanding. In the video, I like the idea that the classwork questions are more complicated than the homework questions (Edutopia, 2012). So the purpose of designing complex classwork questions for students is to encourage them to work collaboratively to reach an optimal solution (Edutopia, 2012). The homework questions are designed to be more straightforward because students can do them individually after the class time (Edutopia, 2012). By thinking my personal experience, some of my professors like to test the materials we discuss in class instead of homework questions. Therefore, cooperative learning is a fundamental learning approach for us as students to learn and grow. As a result, cooperative learning activity is designed in our interactive learning topic – Descriptive Statistics for grade 10 students to give them the experience to explore learning Statistics together.

Post 2: Inquiry-based learning

Other than cooperative learning, I learned about another learning approach, inquiry-based learning, by going through Yuqi’s post. Hi Yuqi, I like how you format your blog, which contains different colors of fonts, images, and video, catching my eyes. From your blog, I learned that inquiry-learning is a student-centered learning approach that teachers guide the students to construct the learning material through hands-on experience. The video in your post is also beneficial to answer my question ‘what is the role of the teacher?’. The teacher plays the role of the facilitator of learning to explore the unit and paying attention to preparing the designed activities for students (Crombie, 2014). Additionally, I am interested in your group’s blueprint of spicy Chinese food culture. I think this topic would be attractive to people in western culture. I totally agree with you to use both direct instruction and cooperative learning methods in your interactive learning resource, especially demonstrating the material to students before doing the collaborative activities, because it would be easier for them to understand the traditional Chinese food culture, such as the different variety of ingredients, different ways of cooking. Even though I agree with you that inquiry-learning is not the best learning approach to align with your topic, it could be used later in the class to engage students in activating their curiosities once they fully understand the history of spicy Chinese food culture. For example, in group work, one group member could question the group about the ingredient that he saw earlier in Chinatown. Then, the whole group can investigate the question in their own way, and finally, they can present the answer in the class as a group. One of the assessments that I can think of right now about the final project of your topic is to let each group cook a traditional spicy Chinese dish by using the recipes and material they learned in the class and share the dish with the rest of the class. This hands-on project would reflect how much of the class content they understand. Also, it contains collaborative interaction for groups’ contributions. Lastly, after reading your post, I am curious about what kind of assessments did your group designed.

I really enjoin the time reading my peers’ posts, and I am looking forward to doing peer reviews of our interactive learning recourse.

References

Edutopia. (2012). Collaborative Learning Builds Deeper Understanding [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWEwv_qobpU

Crombie, S. (2014). What is Inquiry-Based Learning? YouTube.com. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u84ZsS6niPc&t=198s

Cooperative learning is a learning method that allows small groups of people to work cooperatively on a task, and it applies to students from kindergarten to college (TeacherVision, n.d.). It is one of the practical teaching approaches for high school students to learn about different subjects. In classrooms, cooperative learning allows students to work together in smaller groups to achieve a learning task assigned by the teacher. In groups, the students can present their ideas, share information, and interact with others instead of listening to the teacher talking and writing notes all the time. Therefore, the benefit of cooperative learning is having a chance for peers to gather together and support each other with discussion (TeacherVision, n.d.). It works well in both face-to-face and online environments to encourage people to teamwork. Then, each group member would assign a part and take responsibility for their parts to commit the group task (TeacherVision, n.d.). When the cooperative learning group completes the learning task, the group members obtain value in motivation, problem-solving, teamwork, and collaboration (TeacherVision, n.d.). Moreover, students who develop collaboration skills in cooperative learning could become adults who will work effectively in teamwork in any workplace. However, the negative impact for cooperative learning is that there could be a chance for students to talk to each other about the task-unrelated topic (Roetheli, 2018). It could lose the opportunity for students to have an academic conversation (Roetheli, 2018). Therefore, the teacher needs to take the responsibility to circulate the room and to join in groups, make sure they are all on the right topic.

There are different types of strategies in cooperative learning, such as the Jigsaw model and project-based learning. The Jigsaw model, developed by Elliot Aronson in 1971, enables each student to take responsibility for one subtopic or subcategory, do research, and then teach the rest of the group members (Gonzalez, 2015). In this YouTube video, Jennifer (2015) talks about the five steps of the Jigsaw model to encourage students’ collaboration and to result in better learning outcomes.

The first step is to divide students into smaller groups called the Jigsaw Group in the video. The second step is to divide the topic into subtopics with the same number of subtopics as the number of students in the group. Then, the next step is to assign one subtopic to each person in the Jigsaw Group. Each student is responsible for one subtopic, and they need to do research and study on their own. After students finish their research, they meet in Except Groups, which is step four. In this step, all the students who have the same subtopics gathered together to discuss their ideas and collaborate in preparing a presentation to show to their Jigsaw group later. Eventually, the last step- step 5 indicates that students return to their Jigsaw Groups to present their information while others listen and write notes (Gonzalez, 2015).

Furthermore, for other types of cooperative learning, such as project-based learning, Tuckman’s model would help students improve their performance when students are assigned randomly into groups and want to define their roles in the team. In 1965, Bruce Tuckman established the five stages: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning, as Tuckman’s team development model ( Toggl, n.d.). The description of each stage of the model is explained in the figure (see Figure 1). In developing a team, the stages start from where the team is formed to where the team is end ( Toggl, n.d.) It helps individuals acknowledge every part of a team development process. Following Tuckman’s model, it supports team members plan clear direction, define each work role, adjust their behaviours, and eventually build a high-functioning team to accomplish their final learning task.

According to my pod’s topic – Descriptive Statistics: Mean, Median, Mode, Variance and Standard Deviation, I think cooperative learning would be helpful for part of the learning process, such as problem-solving activity. From my own learning experience on Statistics/Mathematics at high school, the combination of direct instruction and cooperative learning is the most popular approach for teachers to structure the lecture. During the first half of the class, the direct instruction approach would be used to present and teach the knowledge to students. In this case, the teacher would stand in front of the classroom and introduce the main points of this lecture by writing down the definition of each concept on the whiteboard. The teacher would use examples to apply to each concept to help students better understand them. At the same time, students would copy the notes from the whiteboard while listening to the class. Once all the students have heard the conceptual details of what they are learning, it is time for cooperative learning activity.

The teacher could form the group and ask them to work on application questions or discuss the learning material in a limited time frame. After students work together toward their goals, they could have a chance to present their results to the class for class-wide discussion, which allowed other groups to hear the ideas and learn something new. Overall, I think cooperative learning itself is not the best learning approach align with our topic of Descriptive Statistics. At the beginning of the class, most students may not focus on the learning material yet, so they will not pay attention when they break into groups ( Zook, 2018). Group discussion may just become talking off topics without learning anything. Therefore, the best solution aligns with our topic: to start with direct instruction by presenting the knowledge to students and ending with breakout group interacted activities.

Reference

Gonzalez, J (2015). The Jigsaw Method [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euhtXUgBEts&t=183s

Infodiagram. (2019). 7 Design Ideas for Group Development Chart Slide – Blog – Creative Presentations Ideas. Blog. Retrieved from https://blog.infodiagram.com/2018/06/7-group-development-ppt-chart-ideas.html.

Roetheli, A. (2018). Disadvantages of Using Cooperative Learning in the Classroom. Teaching in the Fast Lane. https://teachinginthefastlane.com/2018/05/disadvantages-of-cooperative-learning.html.

TeacherVision (n.d.). Cooperative Learning: Teaching Strategy (Grades K-12). Retrieved from https://www.teachervision.com/professional-development/cooperative-learning.

Toggl. (n.d.). 5 Stages of Team Development. Retrieved from https://toggl.com/track/stages-of-team-development/.

Zook, C. (2018). What Is Cooperative Learning and How Does It Work? Digital Curriculum for CTE & Elective Teachers. https://www.aeseducation.com/blog/what-is-cooperative-learning-and-how-does-it-work#:~:text=Cooperative%20learning%20is%20the%20process,and%20help%20each%20other%20learn.&text=While%20it’s%20debatable%20as%20to,powerful%20and%20effective%20teaching%20strategy.