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On Friday I finished day three of the five day Kagan workshop. I will not complete the rest of the days until right before school starts (not sure why they split up the days like this). So, I decided to go ahead and let you know what I’ve learned so far. Basically the one “big idea” of the cooperative learning workshop was that we as teachers need to make sure that we understand the difference between group work and cooperative learning. Once the difference is understood we should always choose to incorporate cooperative learning over group work in our lessons because students score much better under the cooperative learning model.
What is the difference between group work and cooperative learning? We all know what a typical classroom looks like when we tell our students to “pair up with a partner and discuss this” or “find four people and as a group, work on this together”. Kagan considers this group work and not good enough because all students aren’t necessarily held accountable for their input and students have opportunities to hide and not participate.
Within a Kagan structured class, group work becomes so much more than just interacting with your group for a few minutes. Working together becomes a common activity where students feel safe, they feel that they need each other to succeed, and that they can’t hide. This is possible because the group activities are structured in a such a way that all students have to positively interact with each other, all are individually held accountable, they always equally participate within groups, and are engaged because they are constantly interacting within this group.
This translates into the classroom through the use of what Kagan calls structures. Structures are activities that dictate every part of how students interact with each other in their teams (teams are groups of four students that sit together and are of mixed ability). For example, for homework students were asked to find information about the characteristics of Romanticism in poetry. In class using the structure “Timed Round Robin” each student in the group would have 30 seconds to talk about one element they found and give an example. This would continue until every student went around and discussed what they found. This structure is very simple and seems common enough, but there are so many more structures that we learned for all types of instruction that also helped to build class and team communities.
Will I use this in the classroom? Absolutely, I see no reason not to because the structures improve upon my own ideas about having students working together. The workshop gave me so much more instruction on how to implement cooperative learning activities effectively. It also gave me a sense of step by step ways to build a safe classroom community which is personally very important to me. I will be teaching 9th and 10th grade English.
If you have any questions or want me to explain anything more clearly please don’t hesitate to ask.
ok my district is looking into Kagan how has it worked for you Virgoala? I have just had a 1 day training and I am not sure we can get all the staff on board. The cost is $35,000 for a school wide training, a hard hit in these times. Would love your opinion
We are a Kagan cooperative learning school & have been for many, many years. We love the Kagan cooperative structures & use them all the time in our classrooms K-6.
You could get one of the books & do a book study on your own, taking turns demonstrating the structures with staff at staff meetings. We were lucky to train with Kagan years ago, but we now put the structures into practice at staff meetings for newer staff.
Our school-wide behavior is awesome, thanks in part to Kagan cooperative learning.
I did training years ago and implemented it as well as I could in a school system that didn't implement it with fidelity. I think the general consensus among schools and educators I know who have practiced cooperative learning over the years is that many, even most, of the structures are invaluable and cooperative learning is good, but that cooperative grading is not. Students still need personal accountability for mastery of content, IMHO.
I recently went to a Kagan conference and found the ideas to be amazing. The comment made about cooperative grading misses the point entirely. It is cooperative learning! The ideas of Kagan are about getting your students involved and interacting with the material. They use each other as support, while students are learning and need guidance, then you give them an individual assignment. It's not meant to be all Kagan all the time, you should still have times when students work independently.
I am very much interested in the Kagan structures. I just fell in love with it. It made my classes interesting and my students just love to try out the structures I introduced to them. But then I find it difficult to get my colleagues to try the structures in their classes. What should I do?
This stuff is really old. I didn't even know they were still giving workshops on it. I really can't understand why anyone would need to pay to use the structures - I learned most of them in grad school over 10 years ago. It's essentially just putting students in groups but making sure everyone has to do something specific and allotting time so that each person must participate. I think you could get a book and teach yourselves.
The one thing I really dislike about Kagan is that some of the pairing activities are just awful for shy people, and really should not be used. Anything that requires people to find their own partners should not be used. As a teacher, I go to a lot of workshops and things where they make teachers pair up using some of those activities, and it's always painful for me. I know other people who feel the same way. The worst is the one where you have to put your hand up and quickly find a partner, and you are supposed to go to the first person you see with their hand up, but it ends up being like musical chair with partners and a few people are always left standing with their hands in the air last and no partner in sight. Instead, assign partners randomly - there are many creative and fun ways to do this that are way better than torturing students with social humiliation.
This stuff is really old. I didn't even know they were still giving workshops on it. I really can't understand why anyone would need to pay to use the structures - I learned most of them in grad school over 10 years ago. It's essentially just putting students in groups but making sure everyone has to do something specific and allotting time so that each person must participate. I think you could get a book and teach yourselves.
The one thing I really dislike about Kagan is that some of the pairing activities are just awful for shy people, and really should not be used. Anything that requires people to find their own partners should not be used. As a teacher, I go to a lot of workshops and things where they make teachers pair up using some of those activities, and it's always painful for me. I know other people who feel the same way. The worst is the one where you have to put your hand up and quickly find a partner, and you are supposed to go to the first person you see with their hand up, but it ends up being like musical chair with partners and a few people are always left standing with their hands in the air last and no partner in sight. Instead, assign partners randomly - there are many creative and fun ways to do this that are way better than torturing students with social humiliation.
You know, I started the thread, long ago.
After about a year, I gave it up. Too many assumptions about the perfect classroom, and we had an honors class, on our team, so in my other three sections, we lacked the A and B people, so we had the blind leading the blind.
Some of the basic stuff is good, but our district spent a fortune and now they have moved to the 2nd or 3d best new thing, leaving Kagan in the dust!
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Day 1-3
