Essay On Cooperative Learning

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1 Introduction There is age-old and on-going struggle for the soul of education, fought over models of teaching and learning between those who believe in education as ‘acquisition’ and those who see education as ‘participation’. Frank Coffield typifies the key ideas of the former as “delivery, transmission, internalisation, achievement, accumulation and transfer” Coffield (2008:8) and the latter as “community, identity, meaning, practice, dialogue, co-operation and belonging” (ibid). This essay will focus on one of this second set and argue that what is needed in education is more cooperation. Students need to learn about interdependence and the social skills needed in our world today. The basic unit of society is the family – Families practice…show more content…
Cooperative learning (CL) is the use of small groups for instructional purposes to magnify the learning of all the students. CL is built on the foundation of social interdependence theory which states that the outcomes of individuals learning is affected by their own and others’ actions. The spirit and practice of cooperation/collaboration needs to replace traditional practices in the classroom in the pursuit of worthy goals. In what follows the superiority of cooperative learning (social interdependence) over traditional learning will be discussed and…show more content…
A community whose purpose is to achieve meaningful goals. A community like a family is characterised by caring. The quality of caring determines how strong or how weak a learning community is. Personall relationships are an integral part of coooperative learning groups and like a family the more personal the relationships the more the accountability. Learning communities need to evolve into extended families where achievement of common goals and caring consideration for members are ethical norms of the group. This decription of cooperative learning stand in strong contrast to the self centered “dog-eat-dog” attitude towards education and learning, attributed to the competitive and individualistic structures of

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