Co-operative learning—a good teaching strategy
IN China almost everyone knows the allusion: “When a monk lives alone, he never worries about having water to drink as he himself has to solve the problem. When two monks live together, they help each other to carry water. But when three monks live together there is no water to drink.” And why is this? Because they don't co-operate.
I hate to admit it, but we Chinese do not excel at co-operating with each other. One of the reasons is that, from the beginning to the end of our schooling, our teachers have not paid enough attention to developing this trait. Year in, year out, we slowly get the bad habit of relying only on ourselves. Yet in real life, we encounter work that demands co-operating with others. We simply cannot function if we are unable to co-operate.
How can teachers rectify this situation in the classroom? I think co-operative learning is one of the best teaching strategies in developing the student's co-operative ability.
This is where co-operative learning comes in. This is a set of instructional methods in which students work in small mixed ability learning teams. The students in each group are responsible not only for learning the material that has been taught in the class but also for helping their teammates learn.
These groups require a lot of teamwork and interaction among students: there should be a mix of boys and girls; this way, students learn to work with one another, to listen to one another carefully and to respect each other’s ideas; students in their own groups have the opportunity to talk about subject content, to articulate their ideas and ask que
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