“Cooperative learning, as a set of strategies, is woefully under-used in education.”
This quote by Dr Russell Bishop is puzzling given that cooperative learning has the largest empirical base of any other intervention. However, we are very aware that many schools do not engage with cooperative learning PLD, despite the evidence.
Are you using cooperative learning? Maybe this page will provide the motivation you need to take action.
Let’s look at the research…
-
Before turning to applied work in classrooms,I had done basic research on the social motives and social interaction of children. Years of research revealed that the single most powerful determinant of the cooperativeness of children is the situations in which they are placed…It was a natural step to apply those findings to the classroom by designing situations that elicited cooperation among students. If teacher create the right kinds of situations for students, they foster a range of positive outcomes among students including cooperativeness.
-
While testimonials from teachers, students, and administrators (principals) are important, especially when they are backed up with hard data, there are more important reasons supporting the adoption of Kagan Structures. In the long run an educational innovation must pass tougher tests than boosting teacher enthusiasm and student test scores. If the innovation boosts achievement as narrowly defined by academic tests, but does little to foster understanding or to develop the whole students, in the long run it too will fade. To endure, an educational innovation must align with what we hold to be ost valuable as educators: fostering the wide range of skills and virtues which will allow students to function successfully and function with dignity across the range of (often unpredictable) situations in their life.
Our mission is to prepare students with the cognitive skills and relationship skills that will allow them to function well in the rapidly changing interdependent world of tomorrow.
-
Teachers use structures all the time. At any moment in a classroom there is almost always an underlying structure, whether the teacher is aware of it or not. Worldwide, one of the most frequently used structures is Whole Class Question-Answer.
Although it is relatively universal, it is a very inefficient way to reach almost all of the most desirable educational outcomes.
-
We have in our hands simple yet powerful tools proven to accelerate both excellence and equity. We have a research-proven, school-tested solution to educational recovery. To revolutionalize educational outcomes we need only invest in our teachers. We need only to train our teachers in proven instructional strategies and create ongoing support for their implementation.
-
We can never divorce what we teach from how we teach. In fact, the most important and enduring curriculum we deliver is embedded in the instructional strategies we choose on an moment-to-moment basis in our classrooms.
Every choice of an instructional strategy is also a choice to deliver an embedded curriculum. There is a curriculum embedded in every instructional strategy. The traditional distinction between curriculum and instruction breaks down!
-
“You do not get out of a problem by using the same consciousness that got you into it.”
- Albert Einstein
Education has attempted to solve problems of the 21st Century by using 20th Century concepts. And it just won’t work.
-
What amazes me is that in every country, the most common instructional strategies engage some learners while leaving a large subset of students disengaged. It is an enormous waste of potential. Inadvertently, teachers worldwide call on high achieving students to respond while allowing the low achieving students to hide, slip through the cracks. This inequitable engagement creates a progressive achievement gap.
This dismal picture can be remedied rather easily. Teachers can abandon traditional, inequitable instructional strategies, adopting instead simple, proven strategies that engage all learners equally.
-
The overall impact of effect size research is to focus educators not juts on what makes a reliable difference, but rather on what makes an important difference. Effect size research makes it clear that cooperative learning and Kagan Structures stand out as among the most powerful tools for educators who strive to substantially accelerate achievement and improve a host of additional positive outcomes.
-
As secondary teachers, we have the responsibility of helping students master our academic content. The research data, as well as the experiences of teachers and students, makes it clear that students perform better academically when we use Kagan Structures. Kagan Structures elevate high school achievement.
As secondary teachers, we have a second and broader set of responsibilities. To have students leave our classrooms college- and career-ready. We need to prepare students with thinking skills and interpersonal skills necessary for success in the 21st century workplace and world. As our students prepare for college and beyond, they need skills for success in an increasingly interdependent and fast changing environment in which innovation and the ability to work well with others are at a premium. Students cannot acquire those skills in our classrooms if they do not work with others.
-
In the minds of many educators, discipline problems, poor achievement, achievement gaps, and school dropout are each separate, serious problems in need of distinct sets of remedies. Many approaches have been suggested and implemented, some of which have been a success. What if, however, each of these problems is not separate, not in need of different remedies? What of they are all to some extent symptoms of the same disease? Treatment of symptoms is not as efficient as treatment of diseases.
In this paper, I will argue that we can make substantial progress in treating the pressing problems of discipline problems, achievement gaps, and dropout by changing traditional instructional practices that create student disengagement. Lack of instructional strategies that create engagement for all students is a common case of all three problems.
With a preventative rather than a treatment model, most students who would have been discipline problems become fully engaged, with no desire to disrupt or disengage. Students who would have fallen behind receive the stimulation and support they need to excel. Students, who outed have been labelled dropouts, become fully engaged in the educational systems, moving on to higher learning.
-
Educators are complaining about surreptitious and even overt use of cell phone texting during class. The premise of this paper is that cell phone texting is not the problem; it is merely a symptom of a lack of highly engaging instructional strategies. In the absence of highly engaging external stimuli, students turn to alternative sources of stimulation: External (texting) or Internal (mind-wandering). Both of these alternative activities engage the social cognition network, the default network of the brain. By adopting highly interactive, engaging instructional strategies, we treat the disease, not the symptom. In the process we create greater liking for class, content, and teacher, and support proven acceleration of achievement.
-
Kagan Structures are radically transforming classrooms across the United States and in many parts of the world. In classrooms in which the Kagan Structures are used regularly, students for whom English is a second language learn both English and academic content far more quickly and far more thoroughly than when traditional instructional strategies are used. The Kagan Structures also promote language and content learning far more than does group work.
What may be even more important than the opportunities for language acquisition in Kagan Structures is their focus on higher-level thinking and cognitive development. Through full inclusion in classroom activities that require understanding concepts and applying new knowledge, language learners have full access to curriculum. Language proficiency truly can be acquired simultaneously with content mastery and achievement of challenging performance standards through Kagan Structures.
-
Today, as teachers have the unprecedented challenge of preparing students for a world we can only dimly imagine. The change rate itself accelerates exponentially as new technology produces even newer technology. Think for a moment of all the things we have today that were not invented just a decade ago. We can no longer imagine with confidence what our lives will include a decade from now, never mind the myriad changes that will occur over the entire course of the lives of our students.
Preparation for accelerating change must include development of a full range of thinking skills. We need to think of thinking as a process, not a place. Thinking skills are not content to be placed into the brain. Rather, they are processes which, when practiced, empower the brain to work more efficiently. Teaching thinking skills with a curricular approach treats them as content; teaching them with the instructional approach treats them as processes.
-
The lack of virtues among today’s youth has been analyzed and discussed in many forms. The best documentation of the erosion of character virtues is presented by Thomas Lickona in his book, Educating for Character. How Our Schools can Teach Respect and Responsibility.
We can attribute the lack of common virtues to many things. The most important single factor is the large amount of time today’s youth spend unsupervised. Unlike previous generations, students spend far more non-school hours than not out of the watchful eye of caring, concerned, older others. We are reaping the harvest of creating the unsupervised generation.
In the Structural Approach, we foster the acquisition of the virtues not by teaching the virtues but by structuring the interaction of students with each other and with the curriculum so that the virtues are acquired as part of any lesson, regardless of the content.
-
Emotional Intelligence (EQ) can be more important than IQ in determining not just academic achievement, but also job and life success. Our very best hope for developing EQ among pupils is the daily use of simple instructional strategies called structures - using EQ structures as part of every lesson, at all grade levels, and across all curriculum areas. Adopting EQ structures is not a change in curriculum; it is a change in instruction. Ironically this shift in approach to instruction revolutionlizes what is learned in school far more than any change in academic curriculum.
The structures are a way of teaching by doing. Rather than lecturing about understanding or impulse control. The structures allow students to practice understanding and impulse control on a daily basis. Only by repeatedly practicing the skills of EQ are they acquired. The cooperative learning structures have a proven research base demonstrating that they promote social development, social relations, and relationship skills.
READ MORE
You will be on this page for a variety of reasons. These articles, written by Dr Spencer Kagan*, report on research and experiences while working with educators over many years, and from around the world. There is, as to be expected, American terminology (administrator instead of principal), but please see past this to the depth of research and knowledge embedded in every page.
There are a variety of ways they can be used:
As research into Kagan for your own purposes
To support implementation through keeping the ‘why’ at the forefront
As readings for PLGs or staff meetings
Find relevant quotes for signage and discussion purposes
Key paragraphs explaining the rationale for implementation of Kagan for newsletters, BOT and parent meetings
If nothing else, they will create resonance and dissonance as teachers reflect on key ideas and points, and contrast findings against their own practice.
We welcome feedback, so please send comments or questions to jennie@kagan.nz
*Spencer Kagan, PH. D., is a former professor of psychology and education at the University of California. Presently he directs Kagan Publishing and Professional Development, San Clemente, California.
Do you agree?
“The new measure of a sufficiently prepared student is one who has the knowledge and skills to keep learning beyond secondary school, first in formal settings, and then in the workplace throughout their careers, so that they are capable of adapting to unpredictable changes and new economic conditions and opportunities.”
- D. T. Conley, Getting Ready for College, Careers, and the Common Core, 2014
