Research Base
We have known all this for a long, long time. Reflecting over 1,200 studies, cooperative learning—which is to say, the explicit teaching of social skills in group settings—is probably the single best-researched and most effective innovation in education in the last half-century (Johnson & Johnson, 2009). It is based on social psychology research dating back to Kurt Lewin's 1940 discovery of a phenomenon he named group dynamics. Lewin defined group dynamics as the way small groups and individuals react to and interact with one another. His key insight was that groups were not just a combination of their component individuals, but a different, far more complex entity. In trying to explain the power and potential of human groups, Lewin actually coined the phrase, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."
Morton Deutsch continued Lewin's research by examining how the behaviors of people within a social group are interrelated. What both Lewin and Deutsch discovered is that no human group is ever static. Members can change the dynamics by changing their individual behaviors. This revelation sparked attempts to harness the positive power of groups in school settings, resulting in a model called cooperative learning. Led by researchers like Schlomo Saharan, David Johnson, Roger Johnson, Robert Slavin, and others, early cooperative learning models were able to prove how the efforts of people working in groups— like students studying school subjects—could be maximized. (For more about the seventy-five-year research base on social skills development in schools, see the reading list at the end of this book.)
While cooperative learning is significantly more effective than individual or competitive learning approaches (Johnson & Johnson, 2009), it is also challenging to implement: it requires teachers to reframe their own roles. When we set out to teach social and collaboration skills, we need to be not just tellers, but models and coaches—we really do need to become a “guide on the side" versus a “sage on the stage.” Very predictably, when teachers first introduce cooperative learning to their kids, the initial student groups don't always work very well. Why? Well, we can blame the kids' bad upbringing, but in actuality, collaborative work can flop because learning anything new takes time to master. We teachers can be pretty impatient when it comes to an imperfect lesson—and we feel under a lot of pressure to deliver quick results, especially these days. So we may bail out before we've given kids enough time, practice, and feedback to add new behaviors to their social repertoire. Also, as often happens in schools, our district's support for social skills training may suddenly evaporate, leaving teachers scanning the horizon for the next top-down mandate from the central office.
But hey, instead of retreating from the challenges of teaching student collaboration, let's examine the obstacles. We know many of them first hand.
Recollections
Think about your first years of teaching. If they were like ours, you often felt frustrated. We both remember putting students into groups of four or five, hoping for some academic discussion that reflected deep thinking, attentive listening, and careful consideration of one another's viewpoints. Instead, we watched groups quickly careen off task, break up into subgroups, or—even worse—completely ignore one member. Superficial but dutiful conversations would ramp up when we entered a group's gravitational field, about four or five feet away. But when we orbited further out, topics reverted to soccer, music, and who's dating who. It seemed like every time we tried a great group activity it somehow fell flat. Some groups clicked and others clacked. The net benefit felt nil. Disappointed yet again, we would return to what “worked": teacher-directed, whole-class instruction.
Only later, through our study of group dynamics as well as the Johnson brothers' model of cooperative learning, did we understand the planning and decisions that must be made ahead of time in order to get groups to truly collaborate. And hey, guess what? The research almost immediately addressed one of our mistakes: we were making the groups too large! That's why you'll notice that most of our lessons in the beginning part of this book focus on pairs: pairs are easier for students and teachers to manage successfully.
Our guess is that you've experienced the same student collaboration frustrations that we did. If you think more broadly about your own development as a teacher, your comfort and agility increased as your experience enabled you to anticipate potential problems and then prevent them. You found ways to build a more positive classroom community. You became increasingly adept at managing the unforeseen, right on the spot. Perhaps you found a mentor teacher, someone who affirmed your efforts and offered some caring assistance in solving the problems that stumped you. Along the way, most of us attended at least one cooperative learning or collaboration workshop. However, once the training was over, we needed more tangible implementation support than a certificate of attendance. We hope that this book and its accompanying slides will provide the classroom follow-up that most of us never got.
Back in the 1990s, Nancy became a high-level trainer in the Johnson and Johnson cooperative learning model. She attended advanced training in Minnesota with the Johnson brothers, and became a teacher-leader back home in Chicago. Besides offering colleagues a full week of teacher training in the summer, Nancy also provided monthly follow-up workshops that focused on problem solving, strategizing, and celebration. From all of those staff development encounters with peers, Nancy grew to anticipate the predictable problems those moving from sage to guide would encounter. Today, from our almost-too-many decades of working with kids and educators, we want to offer you the full support you need to bring friendly, supportive, interactive, and collaborative behaviors to life in your classroom.
Starting With a Partner
The simplest way to keep students on task is to put them in pairs. That's the reason why all of the lessons in our first three families use partners. Why are pairs so productive? First, when students are working in partners, the overall engagement level is high; 50 percent of the group members are talking about the material at any given moment. Second, it's easy for students to manage working in pairs, even if they have little collaboration experience. In a pair, all you have to do is pay attention to one person. You don't have to skillfully include others. You don't have to listen carefully in order to combine various ideas. You are less likely to completely monopolize a conversation. Plus, pairs can work quickly. Think about your own committee work: the bigger the committee, the longer everything takes.
The other great thing about pairs is that they are easy to monitor, particularly when partners are sitting side by side. We like to call this arrangement “shoulder partners," as opposed to “face partners,” who are sitting across from each other. The very first lesson (page 40) focuses on forming shoulder partners. Though this lesson only takes a couple of minutes, it's critical for classroom management. When students pair up correctly, the furniture is neither impeding interaction, nor is it blocking your ability to get around the room easily and quickly. A cornerstone of on-task behavior is teaching groups how to sit as close together as possible. The closer that partners sit together, the better they can focus on each other and ignore other students in the room. So here's a quick tip: if you notice student groups getting distracted by others, look at how the furniture is arranged, how close the kids are sitting, and where the members are facing. Students with a goal of talking to members of other groups will position their bodies at angles that make off-task conversations easy and convenient. Incorrect seating also sends this message to a partner: “I'm not interested in you or what you have to say."
By now you are probably wondering, “Don't
