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Cooperative Learning in the classroom: How to do it

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A true cooperative learning experience requires that a number of criteria be met.

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Brain-Friendly Strategies for the Inclusion Classroom

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Brain-Friendly Strategies for the Inclusion Classroom

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Brain-Friendly Strategies for the Inclusion Classroom

About

Many teachers in regular classrooms feel unprepared to teach students with learning disabilities. Fortunately, brain research has confirmed that strategies benefiting learners with special challenges are suited for engaging and stimulating all learners. In this book, neurologist and classroom teacher Judy Willis explains that we can best help students by putting in place strategies, accommodations, and interventions that provide developmentally and academically appropriate challenges to suit the needs, gifts, and goals of each student. Brain-Friendly Strategies for the Inclusion Classroom will help teachers

Table of contents

Looking into Multiple Intelligence Brains

Teaching Students with Attention Disorders

ASCD empowers educators to achieve excellence in learning, teaching, and leading so that every child is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.

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Brain-Friendly Strategies for the Inclusion Classroom

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Brain-Friendly Strategies for the Inclusion Classroom About Many teachers in regular classrooms feel unprepared to teach students with learning disabilities. Fortunately, brain research has confirmed that strategies benefiting learners with special challenges are suited for engaging and stimulating all learners.

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10 Recommendations for Improving Group Work

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10 Recommendations for Improving Group Work

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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Many faculty now have students do some graded work in groups. The task may be, for example, preparation of a paper or report, collection and analysis of data, a presentation supported with visuals, or creation of a website. Faculty make these assignments with high expectations. They want the groups to produce quality work-better than what the students could do individually-and they want the students to learn how to work productively with others. Sometimes those expectations are realized, but most of the time there is room for improvement-sometimes lots of it. To that end, below is a set of suggestions for improving group projects. A list in the article referenced below provided a starting place for these recommendations.

1. Emphasize the importance of teamwork-
Before the groups are formed and the task is set out, teachers should make clear why this particular assignment is being done in groups. Students are still regularly reporting in survey data that teachers use groups so they don't have to teach or have as much work to grade. Most of us are using groups because employers in many fields want employees who can work with others they don't know, may not like, who hold different views, and possess different skills and capabilities.
2. Teach teamwork skills-Most students don't come to group work knowing how to function effectively in groups. Whether in handouts, online resources, or discussions in class, teachers need to talk about the responsibilities members have to the group (such as how sometimes individual goals and priorities must be relinquished in favor of group goals) and about what members have the right to expect from their groups. Students need strategies for dealing with members who are not doing their fair share. They need ideas about constructively resolving disagreement. They need advice on time management.

3. Use team-building exercises to build cohesive groups-Members need the chance to get to know each other, and they should be encouraged to talk about how they'd like to work together. Sometimes a discussion of worst group experiences makes clear to everyone that there are behaviors to avoid. This might be followed with a discussion of what individual members need from the group in order to do their best work. Things like picking a group name and creating a logo also help create a sense of identity for the group, which in turn fosters the commitment groups need from their members in order to succeed.

4. Thoughtfully consider group formation-Most students prefer forming their own groups, and in some studies these groups are more productive. In other research, students in these groups "enjoy" the experience of working together, but they don't always get a lot done. In most professional contexts, people don't get to choose their project partners. If the goal is for students to learn how to work with others whom they don't know, then the teacher should form the groups. There are many ways groups can be formed and many criteria that can be used to assemble groups. Groups should be formed in a way that furthers the learning goals of the group activity.

5. Make the workload reasonable and the goals clear-Yes, the task can be larger than what one individual can complete. But students without a lot of group work experience may struggle with large, complex tasks. Whatever the task, the teacher's goals and objectives should be clear. Students shouldn't have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what they are supposed to be doing.

6. Consider roles for group members-Not all the literature recommends assigning roles, although some does. Roles can emerge on their own as members see what functions the group needs and step up to fill those roles. However, this doesn't always happen when students are new to group work. The teacher can decide on the necessary roles and suggest them to a group with the group deciding who does what. The teacher can assign the roles, but should realize that assigning roles doesn't guarantee that students will assume those roles. Assigned roles can stay the same or they can rotate. However they're implemented, roles are taken more seriously if groups are required to report who filled what role in the group.

7. Provide some class time for meetings-It is very hard for students to orchestrate their schedules. Part of what they need to be taught about group work is the importance of coming to meetings with an agenda-some expectation about what needs to get done. They also need to know that significant amounts of work can be done in short periods of time, provided the group knows what needs to be done next. Working online is also increasingly an option, but being able to convene even briefly in class gives groups the chance to touch base and get organized for the next steps.

8. Request interim reports and group process feedback-One of the group's first tasks ought to be the creation of a time line-what they expect to have done by when. That time line should guide instructor requests for progress reports from the group, and the reports should be supported with evidence. It's not good enough for the group to say it's collecting references. A list of references collected should be submitted with the report. Students should report individually on how well the group is working together, including their contributions to the group. Ask students what else could they contribute that would make the group function even more effectively.

9. Require individual members to keep track of their contributions-The final project should include a report from every member identifying their contribution to the project. If two members report contributing the same thing, the teacher defers to the student who has evidence that supports what the student claims to have done.

10. Include peer assessment in the evaluation process-What a student claims to have contributed to the group and its final product can also be verified with a peer assessment in which members rate or rank (or both) the contributions of others. A formative peer assessment early in the process can help members redress what the group might identify as problems they are experiencing at this stage.

Students, like the rest of us, aren't born knowing how to work well in a group. Fortunately, it's a skill that can be taught and learned. Teacher design and management of group work on projects can do much to ensure that the lessons students learn about working with others are the ones that will serve them well the next time they work in groups.

Reference: Hansen, R.S. (2006). Benefits and problems with student teams: Suggestions for improving team projects. Journal of Education for Business, September/October, 11-19.

Reprinted from Improving Group Projects. The Teaching Professor, 27.6 (2013): 4-5. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved.

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10 Recommendations for Improving Group Work

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Many faculty now have students do some graded work in groups. The task may be, for example, preparation of a paper or report, collection and analysis of data, a presentation supported with visuals, or creation of a website. Faculty make these assignments with high expectations.

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Free Educational Articles | Education.com

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Education and parenting articles offer expert tips and information on raising kids. Read educational articles, parenting articles, & more

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Achievement Gap Measures In School Accountability Systems

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Achievement Gap Measures In School Accountability Systems

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So-called achievement gaps - the differences in average test performance among student subgroups, usually defined in terms of ethnicity or income - are important measures. They demonstrate persistent inequality of educational outcomes and economic opportunities between different members of our society.

So long as these gaps remain, it means that historically lower-performing subgroups (e.g., low-income students or ethnic minorities) are less likely to gain access to higher education, good jobs, and political voice. We should monitor these gaps; try to identify all the factors that affect them, for good and for ill; and endeavor to narrow them using every appropriate policy lever - both inside and outside of the educational system.

Achievement gaps have also, however, taken on a very different role over the past 10 or so years. The sizes of gaps, and extent of "gap closing," are routinely used by reporters and advocates to judge the performance of schools, school districts, and states. In addition, gaps and gap trends are employed directly in formal accountability systems (e.g., states' school grading systems), in which they are conceptualized as performance measures.

Although simple measures of the magnitude of or changes in achievement gaps are potentially very useful in several different contexts, they are poor gauges of school performance, and shouldn't be the basis for high-stakes rewards and punishments in any accountability system.

Let's take a quick look at four problems with using gaps in the latter context. The first two are "technical" (and not particularly original), but still important. The final two focus specifically on what achievement gaps mean and how they might be used in a formal accountability system. I will then conclude by discussing an alternative approach (one that some states and districts have begun to adopt).

One-Subgroup samples are often too small for precise estimates.This is an old point, of course, since sample size plagues all test-based accountability systems (e.g., Kane and Staiger 2002). That is, schools are small, and so estimates are imprecise. But such error becomes magnified in simple gap measures because you're focusing on even smaller sub-samples. In many urban districts, at least one of those subgroups (e.g., students not eligible for subsidized lunch) is often prohibitively small, and the margin of error for those estimates is often comparable to the magnitude of the gap itself. Again, this is not a new point, nor is it one that doesn't also apply to most accountability measures, but it does bear mentioning.

Two-Gaps based on proficiency rates are not fit for use in most any context. When you measure gaps using proficiency rates, you are basically converting test scores into "yes or no" outcomes for two groups (in the case of income, groups also defined by conversion into "yes/no" outcomes), and then comparing those groups. There is no need to get into the technical details (see, for example, Ho 2008 for details), but the problem here is even worse than it is for overall, non-gap measures such as schoolwide proficiency rates. Proficiency-based gaps, particularly over time, are so prone to distortion that they are virtually guaranteed to be misleading, and should be used with extreme caution in any context, to say nothing of using them in a formal, high-stakes accountability system. There are alternative ways to measure gaps using proficiency- and other cutpoint-based rates (e.g., Ho and Reardon 2012), but I haven't yet seen any states using them.

Three-The sizes of between-group gaps within schools don't tell you much about their performance. To begin with, what does a large gap actually tell us about student performance? Consider a hypothetical school or district in which achievement gaps are completely closed. What this means is that the two subgroups - say, low- and higher-income students, as measured by subsidized lunch eligibility - scored at roughly equal levels on tests. But, what if the higher-income students are relatively low-performing compared with their peers elsewhere? In this case, both subgroups perform at similarly low levels, but we're calling it a success simply because there's no difference between them. Or, similarly, we might call a school with a huge gap a failure, even though both subgroups may score at high levels. Gaps are relative measures, and their magnitude means different things in different circumstances about student performance.

More importantly for our purposes here, simple gaps don't provide much of a signal about the performance of the school (which, in an accountability context, is the key question). This is mostly because gaps rely on the comparison of subgroups' absolute performance measures (how highly students score), and student subgroups often enter their schools with large gaps between them. Schools may certainly contribute to size of the gaps between subgroups of the students they serve, but it's impossible, using simple gap measures, to separate the school's impact from that of where the students started out.

Four-Simple"gap closing"trends often mask highly undesirable outcomes. Even if we assume a more "growth-based" perspective, and look at trends in gaps instead of their size in any given year, there's an obvious problem. There are four short-term (e.g., year-to-year) scenarios in which achievement gaps, say between high- and low-income students, might narrow:

1. Both groups make progress, but with more rapid growth in the scores of lower-income students;

2. Both groups decline in performance, but the scores of higher-income students decline more rapidly;

3. The scores of lower-income students increase, while those of higher-income students remain stable;

4. The scores of lower-income students remain stable while those of higher-income students decline.

All four of these scenarios are quite common, particularly at the school-level, but also within states (see this post on New Jersey's gaps). But only one of them - the first one - could be considered as genuine success. Why would we reward or punish schools based on a criterion that is likely to conceal undesirable outcomes? In addition, even if schools are effective in "closing gaps," they might nonetheless exhibit relatively large aggregate discrepancies between subgroups, since, every year, a cohort of students with a large pre-existing gap may enter the school at the lowest grade while a cohort (at the highest grade) will exit (see this post for an illustration of how this works).
In general, there is only one reason to measure gaps or gap-closing within a school for accountability purposes: The possibility that the school is educating some groups of students effectively and not others. Otherwise, we could just measure overall performance without breaking things down by subgroup.

From this perspective, what's the theory behind identifying schools in which gaps are not closing (again, putting aside the massive measurement problems) for the purposes of high-stakes punitive decisions? The rationale seems to be that these schools are somehow neglecting one subgroup in favor of another. But how likely is this to have occurred systematically and intentionally? Are these schools providing inferior instruction to some students, based on observable characteristics such as income or ethnicity? Probably not.

This is not to say that achievement gaps cannot be useful in policy decisions. Quite the contrary. They can help identify schools in which historically lower-performing subgroups are further behind their peers, and these schools can be given additional resources and support to address these discrepancies. This type of intervention has proven effective in the past ( Harris and Herrington 2006) But punishing schools based on these gaps is essentially the opposite approach (and, again, within-school gaps may not be particularly useful for this purpose).

In short, achievement gaps are a good example of a measure that is very important, but not well-suited for use in formal or informal accountability systems (at least those that are used for high-stakes punishments and rewards). There is obviously a strong case for paying special attention to the testing performance of historically low-performing groups, but using the gaps directly in accountability systems may not be the way to do it. There are alternatives.

For instance, one simple way to focus on lower-performing subgroups would be to adopt a high-quality school-level value-added measure and calculate separate estimates for subgroups, such as those defined in terms of income or race (or, alternatively, the lowest-scoring students without reference to other characteristics). These estimates could be given extra weight or importance in any accountability system. An approach such as this wouldn't solve the small sample problem (unless the subgroup was defined in terms of testing performance, as suggested above), but it would at least reflect the goal of boosting performance among lower-scoring subgroups, and provide an incentive for focusing on these students (though, again, I'm not sure that these incentives are productive, and using gaps to target schools for additional resources may be a more effective route).

Finally, we should also stop using gaps and gap trends in our public discourse about school performance per se. They are measures of student performance (and, when measured within schools, limited ones at that). The goal should be to provide educational opportunity for all, not try clumsily to ensure equal outcomes by rewarding and punishing schools based on the degree to which they exhibit those equal outcomes. In an accountability context, there is a crucial difference.

- Matt Di Carlo

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Rethinking The Use Of Simple Achievement Gap Measures In School Accountability Systems

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So-called achievement gaps - the differences in average test performance among student subgroups, usually defined in terms of ethnicity or income - are important measures. They demonstrate persistent inequality of educational outcomes and economic opportunities between different members of our society.

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Creative and active teaching and learning

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Creative and active teaching and learning

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Creative and active teaching and learning: Dr. John Zubizarreta at TEDxColumbiaSC

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Active Learning - Technology in the classroom

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Active Learning Classrooms: Sharing responsibility for learning

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Things to Remember when Working in Groups 

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Things to Remember when Working in Groups 

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Working Together: Theories, Methods and Skills for Intervention

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Working Together: Theories, Methods and Skills for Intervention

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Working Together: Theories, Methods and Skills for Intervention - lrweb.beds.ac.uk

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Use Ebscohost databases to search for journal articles and other scholarly research materials. Remember that you can search several Ebscohost databases simultaneously and be sure to tick the box for full text to find only material that is available in electronic full text.

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Founding a field theory of work

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In the digital age, technological solutions are being developed and integrated into every aspect of our everyday lives. The ever-changing scope of research in systems and software advancements allows for further improvements and applications.

Systems and Software Development, Modeling, and Analysis: New Perspectives and Methodologies presents diverse, interdisciplinary research on topics pertaining to the management, integration, evaluation, and architecture of modern computational systems and software. Presenting the most up-to-date research in this rapidly evolving field, this title is ideally designed for use by computer engineers, academicians, graduate and post-graduate students, and computer science researchers.

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Systems and Software Development, Modeling, and Analysis: New Perspectives and Methodologies

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In the digital age, technological solutions are being developed and integrated into every aspect of our everyday lives. The ever-changing scope of research in systems and software advancements allows for further improvements and applications. Systems and Software Development, Modeling, and Analysis: New Perspectives and Methodologies presents diverse, interdisciplinary research on topics pertaining to the management, integration, evaluation, and architecture of modern computational systems and software.

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Working Together:Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice

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Working Together:Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice

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and multiple methods in practice (paperback and ebook)

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Advances in the social sciences have emerged through a variety of research methods: field-based research, laboratory and field experiments, and agent-based models. However, which research method or approach is best suited to a particular inquiry is frequently debated and discussed.

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LINKEDIN GROUPS...LOVE 'EM OR HATE 'EM?

There is a lot of discussion about whether or not LinkedIn groups are fertile networking grounds. With over 2 million groups, and 8,000 new ones being created every week, there is certainly opportunity in our midst, isn't there?

Even though posting behavior in some groups is a bit out of control, there are moderators paying attention to their groups, cleaning them up, making sure posts and comments are appropriate, and taking the time to attract and nurture communities of LinkedIn users with like interests.

I am seeing an increase in conversation in a few of the groups I am in, which is great. People are posting, commenting, following up, making their case, acknowledging feedback and sharing others' content. It's not the norm yet, but I am seeing an uptick, and I'm pleased about that. Everyone doesn't agree, and they don't have to. What's important is that discussion is taking place.

S.M.A.R.T. PROCESS FOR GROUP INVOLVEMENT

I want you to use groups on LinkedIn. They are a way to get to know clients, potential clients, media, influencers and others who have something to teach those of us who don't know everything.

In order to make the best use of your time in groups, I've come up with the S.M.A.R.T. Process For Group Involvement.

Remember these 5 words as you navigate Group waters:

I want you to find the groups you should care about based on your practice area, your interests and where your clients hang out. Don't always join the big ones just because they're big. Look at the comment history to see if anyone's actually talking.

What would you add?

What makes group participation valuable to you?

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Nancy Myrland, President, Myrland Marketing & Social Media, is a LinkedIn, Twitter & Social Media Trainer, and a Professional Marketing & Social Media Advisor. She works with lawyers, law firms & legal marketers to help them grow by strengthening their relationships with their clients through the understanding and strategic integration of Social Media into existing marketing practices. Having spent several years in sales, then moving into strategic marketing management in corporate America with Time Warner, she started Myrland Marketing in 2002. Nancy has spent a great deal of time immersing herself in the worlds of Digital / Social Media, and understands how to wisely and efficiently blend the two areas to help lawyers accomplish their goals. Nancy is innovative, passionate, loyal, strategic, and has a depth of knowledge to share with her clients that comes from working in sales/business development, in management and marketing in corporate America with Time Warner and L. M. Berry, and in law firms and other professional services firms. Nancy is a Marketing & Social Media speaker; offering her advice during keynotes, retreats, firm and client meetings. To find out more about Nancy Myrland, visit her blog here: Myrland Marketing Minutes.
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LinkedIn Groups: A S.M.A.R.T Process For Group Involvement