Introduction: The First Four Weeks of Cooperative Learning
The Purpose of these Lessons
This series of e-learning lessons have been written to offer suggestions for educators who have attended training in Cooperative Learning or for others who are interested in starting some activities in their classes.
After returning from academy training, teachers are excited about starting cooperative learning, but are left with this important question, "I have all these ideas, but how/where do I begin?"
As well, eager to begin, teachers try the structures or activities they learned from their workshops or training, but do not experience high levels of success.
Often these low success levels are due to a lack of social skills among students in the class so that when the teacher puts them into a group, the students are not able to function as a team.
These e-learning lessons are designed to do three things:
- assist teachers with the things he or she could do to prepare the students before they are actually put into teams
- to recommend activities and combinations of structures that could be used in the first four weeks to launch a cooperative classroom.
- share best practice through application and reflection
- These activities are suggestions only--choose from them what
you like or those that suit your students and their level of
development
- After trying some activities, it would be great if you would share your successes and challenges in the blog area at the end of each lesson
- As well, if you have other activities that have worked well for you, we would love to hear about them (in German or English)--we have translation tools
- The essence of Cooperative Learning is "Together we are
Better!", so we look forward to hearing from you to to
continue our journey of learning together.
