May/June 2000

By Laurel Shaper Walters

At Parkway South High School in suburban St. Louis, students in Karen Bettis's French classes come prepared to work together. Since the school went to a block schedule of 90-minute classes last year, Bettis has been able to use group work in nearly every class. "I like working with groups because I see the positive benefits," she says.

During her 24-year teaching career, Bettis has attended several workshops on cooperative learning, yet she doesn't use any specific model of cooperative learning. "I know I don't follow all the rules of cooperative-learning activities," she says. "I choose what will work for my class." Defining the "rules" of cooperative learning can be confusing, especially when researchers disagree about what works best. Meanwhile, teachers like Bettis are taking the basic concepts behind cooperative learning and experimenting with ways to apply them in the classroom.

In a recent French II class, Bettis introduces new material and then has students work in pairs to review it. They later reassemble in groups of three to help prepare each other for a vocabulary quiz. A seating chart shows each student's current partner for pair work and a pod of three for group work. "I put these groups together very carefully, spending a lot of time making sure they are heterogeneous," Bettis says. She reorganizes the groups every several weeks but keeps the number of students to three for group work. "I think it's important for them to learn to work with a variety of people, but I have also found that when you do group work with more than three, someone ends up sitting back and other group members tend to do more work."

Getting students to talk to each other in group work is essential to reinforcing their learning, Bettis argues. "When I say group work, that doesn't mean students sit there in a circle writing down answers. The expectation is that they talk through the answers." To make sure that happens, Bettis circulates throughout the room during group work, answering questions and prodding students to challenge each other. "You really have to pay attention to how they're doing," she says.

Window into Students' Minds

Having teachers listen during group work is vital to cooperative learning's success, says Roger T. Johnson, co-director of the Cooperative Learning Center at the University of Minnesota. "The key to cooperative learning from the teacher's point of view is to be able to hear students as they're working, as they're thinking," he says. "You might describe it as a window into the students' minds. You can hear them thinking out loud as they're talking to each other."

That's exactly what Terry Anderson, a 3rd-grade teacher at Robinson Elementary School in Kirkwood, MO, expects to gain from using cooperative learning in her classroom. "The way one child thinks brings another child's thinking along in certain ways," says the 20-year veteran teacher. Anderson is in constant demand when her students are working in groups. She keeps them on task, clarifies expectations, and pushes them to ask the right questions.

For example, after a math investigation about dividing submarine sandwiches equally, she rings a wind chime to get everyone's attention. A group returns from working in the hall, and they all reassemble on the carpet. One member of each group holds a large piece of paper showing their answers and the process they went through to solve the problem. Anderson sits in a rocking chair and asks each group to come forward and explain their strategies. Some used trial-and-error, others estimated and then checked their work. The goal, she says, is to scaffold their solutions, saving the best for last. "But the main thing is reaching a consensus," she says.

Anderson tries various grouping methods to create working groups of three or four students. "If I let them choose their groups, they end up with the same people all the time," she says. Sometimes she will assign students to groups, other times she might allow students to choose a partner and then combine two pairs to make a foursome. The goal is to get students talking and working together. She is convinced that her students are better off working in groups, even if the classroom is louder and more chaotic. "Learning is social," Anderson says, "and the best way for kids to learn is by being actively involved with each other."

Preparing Tomorrow's Lessons

Anderson builds her lessons around what she hears the groups talking about. For example, during the group activity about dividing sandwiches, Anderson gains clues about which aspects of fractions most students understand and which areas require further explanation. As math time ends and the school day winds down, Anderson makes a mental note of what to stress in tomorrow's math lesson on fractions. She reviews what they've learned from each group's approach to the problem and outlines the next step in the project. "Now you know how to get started tomorrow," Anderson says.

The basic concepts of cooperative learning are responsible for many changes in U.S. classrooms. The widespread acceptance of this approach means students like Anderson's are no longer lined up in rows of individual desks. Yet there is a yawning chasm between current practice and recent research about how to use cooperative learning most successfully. For these two teachers, much of the research on what constitutes successful cooperative learning is beyond the scope of day-to-day classroom practice.

What the teachers classify as "cooperative learning" some experts would label mere group work. While most researchers reject the notion of assigning group grades to students, for example, Bettis has experimented with the idea after hearing talk of it at various conferences. These teachers-and the research shows they are not alone-seem to view full implementation of any one cooperative learning program as too limiting or impractical. The bridge between practitioners and researchers in this area is still under construction.