Cooperative Tools for Effective Learning and Teaching

Cooperative Tools:

Assessment for learning

Various assessment tools (tasks, project, tests, discussions, peer feedback, teacher feedback, etc.) are used to help students deepen their knowledge, understanding and skills of the topic they are learning about. Assessment is used to foster students' ownersip of their learning and empower students to learn independently.

Dialogic teaching

Dialogue in education refers to the productive interactions that support students’ deeper learning in the classroom and help them to understand the concepts and construct the meaning of the topic to be learned. Lodge(2005) defines it as the follows: “Dialogue is about engagement with others through talk to arrive at a point one would not get to alone” (p. 134). This engagement must be fostered in education. According to Hämäläinen and Vähäsantanen, (2011) “these productive dialogues do notnecessarily emerge unassisted” (p. 176), but require for the teacher to facilitate the dialogue in the classroom.

Emotionally safe learning environment

Student centered and emotionally safe pedagogy is an attitude. It is not a handbook of tips and tricks, to help us survive our days. It is being physically and emotionally present when the student needs us. It is also thinking more about the process than the product. And in these classrooms the focus is in creating, not copying, no matter what the task is. Emotionally safe classrooms are flexible by their nature and they have rules that are consistent and justified.

Group working

Group work is an essential tool for every teachers. It should not be solely used for projects or creating other products. Having students collaborate during each lesson improves their learning for several reasons: they are actively engaged and get to verbalize their understanding, which is a great learning strategy. Also, students are on approximately same language level, why it is sometimes easier to understand a concept when your peer explains it to you. Teachers' language may be too complicated for optimal understanding.

Meaningful learning

Meaningful learningoccurs when students can relate the classroom content to their own knowledge of life. Niemi et al. (2010) state this as the lived “school day meaningfully experienced” (p. 139). Furthermore, in order for self-regulated learning to develop among students, “adults must provide learners with a guided learning environment and tasks that connect them with other microsystems in personally and culturally meaningful ways” (Hadwin & Oshige, 2011, p. 254).

Peer coaching

Peer tutoring and coaching derive from Vygotsky's theory (usually called ZPD - Zone of Proximal Development) and at simplest it is about a bit more advanced student (usually sibling in Vygotsky's work) helping out with a task that is not within the reach of the "trainee", but just above it. When students explain things to each other they use the vocabulary on their own shared level and because of that they often gain deeper understanding of the topic (taken that they have the basics right, of course).

School enjoyment and school well-being

School-related well-being is an important part of the learning experience. Students’ subjective well-being at school is an often ignored factor in learning (Bradshaw, Keung, Rees, & Goswami, 2011; Long et al., 2012). This school-related well-being is a subset of the general framework of human well-being which, conceptualized by White(2010), emphasizes three components: “the material, the relational, and the subjective” (p. 161). ConsideringMaslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs, it seems obvious that students’ well-being needs must be met before higher-order thinking can occur.

Assessment for Learning

The best environment to improve learning and practice choosing is where we can allow students to make mistakes without penalties. This means having informal and non-punitive assessment and self-assessment systems in place.

Dialogic Teaching

Engaging in dialogue is essential for learning. Constructing knowledge cannot occur in a vacuum. Too often we think that any classroom discussion equals dialogue. It does not.

Conversation and discussion are very broad concepts to describe educational dialogue. Debates are very specific interactions for presenting and supporting an argument, a genre of dialogue focusing on challenging assumptions and knowledge. Argumenting discussion can objectify a perspective and is thus important for reasoning and understanding (p. 108).

Classroom dialogue exists to support understanding. It is not about winning an argument. Nor about an inquiry where students will end up in predetermined conclusion. The traditional classroom talk in the form of IRF (initiation-response-feedback/follow-up) or IRE (initiation-response-evaluation) is definitely not about engaging in dialogue, because the range of acceptable answers is very limited. These closed questions reflect behaviorist-objectivist ideology of education where the knowledge is transmitted to students, and their learning is tested with questions and tests. Well-crafted IRF can lead students “through a complex sequence of ideas” (p. 4), but does it really contribute to the productive interactions that help students to engage in deeper learning and craft individual understanding and transferable knowledge based on the information they received during the discussion?

Dialogue is collaborative meaning-making by nature. It is about equal participants engaging in an attempt to understand the viewpoint of other(s) and defining the meaning in the social setting. Such dialogue is about creating new understanding together, and in that sense it denotes very constructive ideas of learning. Dialogue is very tightly tied to the classroom values and teaching/learning dispositions. In a safe learning environment, where students dare to ask questions and challenge their own beliefs, dialogue can be a very powerful tool for learning.

The essential condition for dialogue to happen is equality. My truth cannot be better than your truth. Dialogue requires openness to rule over the dogma (p.172), in order to make exploration possible. Sometimes this is a very hard change to make in the classroom situation where the teacher is perceived to be the authority of knowledge. Communicating clearly to students about issues that don’t have one signle correct answer helps students to engage in dialogue with the teacher and each other. Wondering is often the first step in learning.

Dialogue involves multiple dimensions of the classroom reality. Working with the tensions that occur in classroom setting is important to make dialogue possible. Having a non-punitive assessment system is important for fostering dialogue in the classroom. Risk-taking behaviors are not likely to happen in a learning environment where students get punished for submitting a “wrong answer”. Right and wrong, true and false, are dichotomies that belong to more objectivist pedagogy and official knowledge, and thus are destructive for collaborative meaning-making.

Focusing on concepts instead of details is a viable way to start using the dialogue in the classroom. It is a good way to help students get engaged in their on learning process.

The page numbers refer to the following book, which is an excellent source for learning more about dialogue and how to us it as a tool for learning:

Littleton, K., & Howe, C. (Eds.). (2010). Educational dialogues: Understanding and promoting productive interaction. Routledge.

Emotionally Safe Learning Environment

Emotionally safe classrooms are flexible by their nature and they have rules that are consistent and justified. Ordering other people arbitrarily around is only a way to show your power over them. Being considerate is generally understood as a virtue, and showing the same politeness to children does not go without rewards. Treating students as individual human beings sounds like basic courtesy to me.

The central values of safety, co-operation, individuality, responsibility and building of realistic self image together create the foundation for an emotionally safe learning environment. Most often these values are expressed in the classrooms and discussed with the students. Ideally the wording of the rules is co-operationally created, and confirmed with the signatures of the teacher and students, and then posted on the wall for further reference.

Stress-free atmosphere is the first principle for creating an emotionally safe growing and learning environment. Creating the feeling of having enough time enables students to focus on their own learning instead of external factors that might disturb their concentration. Knowing that their thoughts and ideas are valued helps students think and express their thoughts more freely. More thinking equals more learning.

The one situation when most of us feel threatened or unsafe is while we are receiving feedback. In an emotionally safe classroom the feedback becomes a natural part of the learning process, and thus stops being scary. While utilizing students' daily self-evaluation and teacher's verbal comments, the feedback system actually becomes a tool for the students to control their own learning. This system also automatically holds students accountable for their own learning and helps them realize how much they already have learned.

Cooperative Tools for Effective Learning and Teaching