About Cooperative Learning Projects. Miguel Carazo

The Musical Chairs

This was the first group, and he talked about some good ideas like for example:

The teacher has to know their students, their roots, so he can know better how are they going to work and how can he prepare the lessons for them to work harder. The teacher is a bit like a guide and he must stimulate the students.

When working in teams, these must be formed by different students, so that they can all learn from each other.

The activity they proposed was great, because we had to divide in groups and search for information of different countries, so that we did the same activity but choosing different type of information.

Amigos del Football

We’ve learned when not to say advantages and disadvantages. We´ve learned that there are different types of teams. Base teams, expert teams and spontaneous. Celebration in groups is important, we must know how to do it, and be respectful.

There are different cooperative learning methods.

Unknowns

We all have doubts, and we must see the teacher as a guide who can help us. Our work may be improved by watching the others’ work.

Our team plans have two objectives. Establish long and short goals. And also have regular reflections, we must analyse the team situation and then make decisions.

Other good idea is to have a review of the team performance. Here it is showed how the team has worked, problems, good points, and finally we make a conclusion.

Dumbledore Teachers’ Army

The presentation is quite original so as they use the Daily Prophet to present their work. Then they showed their ideas in the different pages of the newspaper.

About these new ideas there are some as having an appropriate use of interpersonal skills by helping each other to make a better work. Individual accountability, everyone is important, if I don't do my work, the others are not going to do their work.

Good idea giving a bonus to people who have a higher mark than the 80% of the class.

Promoting learning techniques:

Problem sets: homework is done in groups so that children can see that if someone doesn't work at home, they see how they can be isolated from their group. By knowing how they work the teacher can see who works or not, and he can structure new groups and try to solve these problems of participation.

Labs and projects: the teacher has an individual test about the subject.

Peer lead team: a problem is given to a team and a “guide” is going to help the students to solve it but without giving the answer.

Peer editing, each pair check the work from other group, and finally each group correct their own work taking into account the opinion of the other group.

Modern Students

As a new idea is trust, confidence, we must trust our mates, because is important that if we want someone to do something we must trust him and think that he will do it. Importance of visual contact, cooperative learning is not preparing everything separately. We must talk, debate, and give a feedback after the work is done.

Here there are some tips for teachers, we must form teams of 3-4 people, which have to be heterogeneous, we must promote positive interdependence by making them assume different roles; providing individual accountability, someone is responsible for ensuring that everyone understands everything; help students to develop teamwork skills with team rules; the teacher must supervise the group so that he can help them to solve the internal problems; we as teachers have to explain them why and what are they doing this; finally we must give them a feedback!

Team Perk

Something important we learned with this team is to differentiate a normal tournament, from a Team cooperative tournament. In a TGT all the students win, so what we get is a winner class, and not a winner group or a winner student. The activity they proposed was to create between all of us a list of class rules, where we discovered that although we wanted to ban the use of mobile phones, it was good, because they can be used in a good way, and also we needn’t have to ban the students to talk, so we needed to modify some of the rules in order to make them better understandable and make them easier to follow.

Wanderlust

This is the team I liked more, they had a perfect and original presentation by recording theirselves on videos. Also they took advantage of Miguel's drawing abilities, which was great.
This was very dynamic and the motivated us to pay attention, and this was perfect. Finally the activity was like a summary of all the activities because we had to write about the things we have learned through all the work.