Developing Future Ready Students Workshop Series
FR01
Cooperative Learning: Introducing Teamwork in Education (3 Days)
How can the teacher firstly design and teach traditional mathematics, languages, the humanities, and the sciences, then create lessons on process skills in each of these academic content areas, next teach brain-based differentiated lessons besides infusing social skills as well as cater to the various learning styles?
This course invest teachers with strategies and principles which integrate creativity and flexibility in classroom instruction. These strategies promote self-directed learning and the creation of a student-centred learning environment. Teachers learn to craft their lessons to build student-capacity in 21st Century skills by seamlessly incorporating cooperative learning structures in their lessons to create daily learning experiences in self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, relationship management and responsible decision-making.
Course participants will learn to infuse cooperative learning strategies which are teacher-friendly and easily applied in the classroom, thus allowing the teacher to structure student-to-student interaction after every ten minutes of teacher’s direct instruction. These workshops also introduce easy to apply classroom management strategies besides investing the teacher with tips to seamlessly infuse social skills.
Theories and extensive research support the conclusion that cooperative learning promotes higher level thinking and enhances the quality of reasoning, the developmental level of thinking, metacognition, quality of problem solving, creativity and social perspective-taking in the classroom.
Rationale: Using cooperative learning strategies in the teaching of English, Mathematics, Mother Tongue, Science or any other subject will be a move away from the ethos of a traditional classroom where learners are passive recipients of rote learning and frontal teaching routines.
Course Objectives
At the end of this 3-day programme, participants will be able to:
- Describe and identify the changing roles of students as active learners in the teaching and learning process via pair/group work strategies using interactive approaches in order to develop students who are resourceful, communicative and innovative.
- Demonstrate the ability to use at least cooperative learning strategies which will engage learners across abilities, enabling teachers to become more adept at handling heterogeneity within the classroom - one of the greatest challenges for any teacher.
- Use teaching strategies that cultivate self-directed learning and social responsibility through peer/team sharing activities and role-play.
- Replace any element of the lesson with a cooperative learning structure to transform their existing lesson plans into cooperative learning ones.
- Adopt classroom management and cooperative learning strategies to infuse social skills in their lessons.
Course Content
The course participants will learn the overarching key concepts of cooperative learning and accompanying appropriate strategies which they can use in their subject area of specialisation.
Module 1: Define Collaboration and Cooperation
A brief introduction to the notions of collaboration and cooperation. Participants will discover their main features and how the two words will be used in the course. They will get to know relevant theory related to “group work”, and get familiar with its crucial ingredients
- Collaborate or Cooperate?
- Remarkable Theoretical Background
- Key elements according to Johnson & Johnson
Module 2: Establish a Cooperative Learning Environment
This module aims at helping teacher create a collaborative learning environment by applying practical strategies that gradually and effectively accustom students to working together.
- Role of teachers
- Team Building: Warming up a Collaborative Spirit
- Easy Cooperative Activities
Module 3: Cooperative Classes
This module will present a series of cooperative learning strategies that is at the heart of collaborative lessons. Communication has a key role in all of them.
- Cooperative Learning Strategies such as Pairs Compare, Save the Last Word, Fishbowl Debate, Socratic Circles, Learning Roles, Rotating Review
- Task-Based Learning
- Problem-Based Learning
- The Jigsaw Method
Flagship Programmes
Conscious Classroom Management
Making Thinking Visible through Powerful Questions
