General Teaching Skills / Prof. Masud
EDF 4430/Spring 2013 MDCC

Cooperative Learning: A Successful Approach
Learning constantly takes place in the real world all around us. Social interaction is the key element that plays an enormous role in our daily knowledge acquisition. Not surprisingly, intrapersonal relations the one factor being currently used to promote learning in school classrooms. Not just any kind of social interaction, but a ‘cooperative’ one. Interestingly, John Dewey described education “as a vehicle for teaching citizens to live cooperatively in a social democracy” (Cooper, Robinson, McKinney). And to live in just that kind of society requires cooperative learning at a younger age. In just the right circumstances, cooperative learning inside our classrooms today contributes to an even better education for our children tomorrow.
In Cooperative Learning, students learn from each other in small groups through a variety of techniques towards a common goal (Dahley, 1994). Given the appropriate maturity level, students can thrive in this learning environment because they take advantages from each other’s strengths and knowledge to gain insight. In fact, Cooperative Learning is proven to produce increased academic results when compared to traditional, more individualized teaching styles (Dahley, 1994). According to Slavin, there was a 63% rise in achievement from the cooperative learning groups studied (Dahley, 1994). This evidence lends to the fact that low scoring students are pushed to work harder while working with higher scoring students (Dahley, 1994). On the contrary, one argument states that the higher achieving students are held back from their full potential in this group learning. Yet, those same students reinforce their own learning by teaching others within the cooperative groups: increasing their own retention and eventual