Tag Archives: cooperative learning

Currently reading about how to successfully organize team work in student groups

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Quick summary of this month’s iEarth Journal Club article: Clinton & Smith (2009) focus on how to “make” students take on responsibility in team work through team contracts and peer evaluation, in the context of cooperative learning. My summary below, and the strong recommendation to read what Oakley et al. (2004) have to say about “Turning student groups into effective teams” (see also featured image). That latter article is really one of the most useful articles I have come across over many years of reading, including a great FAQ section, and templates.

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Currently reading about cooperative & collaborative learning (Oakley et al., 2004; Møgelvang, 2023; Wieman et al., 2014)

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iEarth’s current journal club paper deals with collaborative exams as learning opportunities, and this fits perfectly with Anja Møgelvang’s recent article on cooperative learning, where we can find inspiration for how to make this work in practice. So here are my thoughts!

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A quick introduction to Cooperative Learning (summarizing Anja Møgelvang’s workshop)

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Yesterday morning, we had a very interesting “teaching breakfast” as part of #CoCreatingGFI: Anja Møgelvang introduced us to Cooperative Learning. Anja is a PhD student at the Center for Excellence in Biology teaching BioCEED, and in addition has 15 years of experience in high school teaching, and 5 in teacher education, so who better suited to talk about this?

Cooperative Learning (CL) is a highly structured method (and not to be confused with the much less structured collaborative learning) – the teacher sets very clear rules around how groups form, how students work together in groups, how tasks are structured and shared. The goal is to create “positive interdependence”, i.e. structuring groups and tasks in such a way that students depend on each other in order to complete the assignments, and on “individual accountability”, i.e. making sure that there is no social loafing.

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