Month: November 2020

Cooperative learning is a student-centred learning approach. In cooperative learning, students are broken down into various groups and the teacher acts as a supervisor of groups.  It can serve as a break from boring lectures.

The students go into the groups and help each other learn through discussions, the teacher does not directly teach students but rather ensures the groups stay on task with the work assigned to them.

This learning approached can be more fun and it teaches students soft social skills by encouraging them to work as a group.

There are various ways to go around cooperative learning but I am going to highlight two different methods that best align with my group’s topic.

Our learning resource topic is about dinosaurs and it is aimed at grade 1 elementary students.

Employing cooperatively learning to teach grade1 students may be the best way to capture students’ interests in the topics and have them develop the essential social skills they will need as they get older.

So, two methods to incorporate Cooperative learning to grade1 students are :

1. Think-Pair share Model
2. Jigsaw learning model.

In the think-pair approach, students are put into groups and asked to brainstorm an idea or in the case of grade1 students work on a task ( Maybe colouring ) then once done they have to share their final product with the class.

In the Jigsaw approach, students are put into groups and each group is assigned the same overall task, but students in each group are assigned sub-tasks. The individual students are then asked to do some research and then form groups with students assigned the same sub-tasks as them. These new groups are called expert groups.

Finally, bring the students back to their initial groups and then test them on what they have learnt.

Both models will work fine for grade 1 students and encourage interactive learning, the only issue here is that learning might not actually take place and students might only socialize.  Also, in the jigsaw learning model, grade 1 students might lose track of what the initial task at hand is after assigned to new expert groups.

To get around this problem, groups should not be more than 2-3 students and depending on how large the class is more than one teacher might be needed to ensure students stay on track

Learning to me is the act of deeply understanding a concept and being able to use that knowledge subsequently in practice. I agree with Jonassen that the stages of learning determine the theory of learning to adopt. According to Jonassen, there are three stages of learning; which are introductory, advanced and expert. However, I believe that the subject matter of learning also determines what theory of learning is to be adopted. For instance, learning to cook a meal or learning new words.

Personally, I related better with the constructivism theory the most. Why? Because learning in its context seems to stick the most. I remember sometime back  I set a goal for myself to learn at least 50 words every month consistently for a year. The first week I started with 10 words from the dictionary, this cycle continued till the 3rd week. However, I realized that I could not remember more than half of the words I learnt in the previous weeks. This destabilized me because I had put in long hours to read the dictionary and learn those words yet less than a month I had forgotten them. 

Although at that point I wanted to give up because i had put in the work but did not get my desired result.  Eventually, I pushed past the negative thoughts and went back to the drawing board. A thought came to mind that perhaps my mode of learning was not the right one. So, I focused more on learning words by watching movies, listening to the radio and watching the news. I did this because I felt seeing or rather listening to them being used in their context would aid my learning and memory. Guess what? It worked!. Within four weeks I was able to reach my target of learning, understanding and remembering the 50 words. In essence, I came to the conclusion that merely having the theoretical knowledge (learning using the dictionary) did not help me fully understand the meaning of the words rather seeing its use (watching movies) facilitated my learning of the words.