The Essential Elements of Cooperative Learning

A LMOST 10 years ago, I worked in a school district with a science teacher who was using an instructional technique she called TGT. When the other teachers in the district found out that TGT stood for Teams Games and Tournaments, they wondered what in the world she was doing playing games with her science students. Some even questioned her sanity. We didn't know at the time that she had been the only science teacher in the district selected to undergo training in cooperative learning at Johns Hopkins University. For that matter, we didn't even know what cooperative learning was. Now, a decade later, most teachers at least know what cooperative learning is. Many even use cooperative learning methods in their own classrooms. I have used it in teaching high school and college biology students for the last several years and have found these methods to be an excellent addition to more traditional instructional techniques. Cooperative learning has not revolutionized education and probably never will, but teachers are finding that it can be an effective classroom tool. Cooperative learning has been defined as a classroom learning environment in which students work on academic tasks in small, heterogeneous groups (Parker 1985). There has been a great deal of research completed in the area of cooperative learning, and there can be little doubt about these techniques' effectiveness in improving academic achievement (Brophy 1986, Parker 1985, Slavin 1984). As the research evidence has mounted, cooperative learning proponents have developed a series of techniques that may be described as elements of cooperative learning. The elements to be addressed in this paper include: