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