Cooperative Learning Basics for K-6 Classrooms

Creating a Collaborative Class Culture through Structured Lessons

Mar 3, 2009

Cooperative learning is based on five components, which when built into group lessons, will help students learn effectively and get along better with their classmates.

In today’s diverse elementary classrooms, teachers work hard to establish a culture of cooperation and collaboration among their students. In his groundbreaking work, Cooperation in the Classroom (1988), David Johnson identified the five components of a cooperative learning lesson that, when built into any group task, help foster true collaboration among students and create a classroom culture where students focus on helping each other learn to their full potential.

Positive Interdependence

Learning tasks should be structured so that no one in the group can be successful unless the group as a whole is successful. Teachers can accomplish this by giving each student a role or job to complete, such as recorder, reader, or timer, depending on the activity; or providing only one set of materials for the group to share. Group sizes should be small to encourage full involvement of each member, with three to five group members being ideal for full participation.

Face-to-Face Interaction

Cooperative group work should be more than students working side-by-side on the same task. Rather, learning tasks should be structured to engage students in conversation, brainstorming, and creative expression. Children should sit closely together and be encouraged to speak only as loud as they need to for the other group members to hear them, a guideline that prevents group work from lapsing into chaotic noise.

Individual Accountability

One frequent complaint about group work is that it ends up being one or two people doing all the work, with the group receiving the grade. With cooperative learning tasks, the work may be done as a group, but evaluations are done individually, and the success of the group depends on the individual mastery of whatever content is being learned.

Teachers can hold students individually accountable by using group work for the practice of skills or the learning of specific information, but then using an individual test or quiz to evaluate that learning. In more informal settings, teachers can simply move from group to group and question students individually about what they are working on, having group members re-teach or re-practice something that has not been fully learned by an individual student.

Practice of Specific Social Skills

An important and differentiating factor of cooperative learning tasks is the purposeful inclusion of specific social skills, modeled and practiced during the course of the group work. These skills include active listening, taking turns, encouraging others, and shared decision-making, among others.

Teachers structure the group work to feature one or more appropriate social skills, and then spend a moment before work begins modeling what the social skill should look and sound like within the student groups. They then walk from group to group, watching for and reinforcing the use of the recommended social skills during the lesson.

Group Processing

Group processing provides students with the opportunity to evaluate how their group functioned and how they, as individual members, contributed to its success. Teachers can encourage metacognitive reflection after the lesson by asking students to discuss and report what their groups, and they themselves, did well and what they still need to work on during the next lesson.

Cooperative learning provides a structured approach to helping students get along and learn to collaborate with others on common goals. By incorporating these five elements of interdependence, face-to-face interaction, individual accountability, social skills and group processing into small group tasks, teachers will foster a more caring and focused classroom climate, and a team-oriented culture which will ensure student success.

Johnson, David & others. Cooperation in the Classroom. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Co., 1988.

Jolliffe, Wendy. Cooperative Learning in the Classroom: Putting It Into Practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Paul Chapman Educational Publishing, 2007.

The copyright of the article Cooperative Learning Basics for K-6 Classrooms in Classroom Management Tips is owned by Barbara Abromitis. Permission to republish Cooperative Learning Basics for K-6 Classrooms in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.