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Hey, what did folks expect when we went to "cooperative learning"?
I utterly agree. As you can probably infer, I'm not a fan of this particular form of learning because I find it to be morally wrong. Every year, I have to make it unambiguously clear what plagiarism is, even to the point of stating that no collaboration, conversation, groupwork, et cetera, is to take place on work that will receive a grade of any kind. Unfortunately, every year, there are kids who either purposely or inadvertently fail to understand the distinction between doing their own work and copying from another, and this is a serious issue.
It's a large umbrella term that refers to a great number of possible approaches to learning, but the common denominator of all of them is that work in a given class or at a given skill or project is done collectively to a greater or lesser degree.
Although groupwork was surely intended to help promote collaboration and teamwork, and certainly does these things when it's done well, it's done well infrequently (in my experience). Most of the time, what actually occurs in a classroom is this: the one or two kids in a group who want to get a good grade do the lion's share of the work and the credit is distributed to all of the group members. It's sort of like pooling your tips as a waiter.
Teachers like it because it's much easier to grade groupwork than it is to grade individual work. The math makes this decision a simple one: if you assign individual essays to a class of 30 kids, you have to grade 30 essays. Assign group essays to six groups of five, as one teacher in my school does, and you only have to grade six of them. Easy choice...well, at least for some people. Unfortunately, this fails to teach students to sustain the effort of an essay themselves personally, and it certainly blurs the line between work and cheating.
So all the cheaters are still allowed to get their diploma, but are punished from the graduation ceremony???
Talk about a reward, not a punishment.
Meanwhile the innocent kids miss out.
I don't know what the right answer is to this one, seems like kids that don't deserve a reward are getting one and kids that don't deserve a punishment are getting one.
And one kid that used the test still failed! I love how they threw that in there.
It's a large umbrella term that refers to a great number of possible approaches to learning, but the common denominator of all of them is that work in a given class or at a given skill or project is done collectively to a greater or lesser degree.
Although groupwork was surely intended to help promote collaboration and teamwork, and certainly does these things when it's done well, it's done well infrequently (in my experience). Most of the time, what actually occurs in a classroom is this: the one or two kids in a group who want to get a good grade do the lion's share of the work and the credit is distributed to all of the group members. It's sort of like pooling your tips as a waiter.
Teachers like it because it's much easier to grade groupwork than it is to grade individual work. The math makes this decision a simple one: if you assign individual essays to a class of 30 kids, you have to grade 30 essays. Assign group essays to six groups of five, as one teacher in my school does, and you only have to grade six of them. Easy choice...well, at least for some people. Unfortunately, this fails to teach students to sustain the effort of an essay themselves personally, and it certainly blurs the line between work and cheating.
Thanks for the info. I do not use that kind of technique too often in my [Spanish] classroom, but when I do, the kids do it to prepare a skit that they have to perform in Spanish in front of the classroom (you should have seen the look on their faces the first itme I announced that--"you mean, we can't just use the time to goof around and talk?!") I've done group projects but only with groups of two, and each student was graded individually (it was usually obvious who did the majority of the work.)
There was rampant cheating at the last school that I taught at but from what I saw, it had very little to do with the kids but rather the structure and policies of the school itself.
Moreover, I saw what happened to kids who failed or were failing a class[es]. I think that most kids hedge their bets; as far as they're concerned, it's much better to not get into college for cheating or to suffer the disciplinary consequences of cheating than to fail a class or fail out of a school altogether. In that light, cheating appears to be the lesser of two evils. I think that, if anything, this story proves that cheating pays, which is so unbelievably sad.
Hey, what did folks expect when we went to "cooperative learning"?
Some of the subsequent posts to this one are cracking me up - this was a joke, not a condemnation of cooperative learning. In the article it makes no mention of cooperative learning and cooperative learning has zero to do with this cheating scandal.
I wasn't joking. I now have students, seniors, who are unable to function independently on an assignment. This would include AP students. I never give a test when I don't get one, or more, of the following questions: " can we use our books?"; "can we pair up?"; "can I use your computer to Google something"?; "can we use our notes?"; "what's the answer to_____?"; "does this test count?".
I believe that all the examples are a direct result of cooperative learning.
Well, I can't (or wouldn't) take back the reps, but it sure sounded like a joke. There's nothing wrong with learning how to collaborate - if kids can learn to work cooperatively, they should also be able to learn to work independently. If they have been taught to and still can't, I'd wonder about the teaching.
Well, I can't (or wouldn't) take back the reps, but it sure sounded like a joke. There's nothing wrong with learning how to collaborate - if kids can learn to work cooperatively, they should also be able to learn to work independently. If they have been taught to and still can't, I'd wonder about the teaching.
There's nothing wrong with cooperative learning, the problem is that many teachers use it exclusively, in my system because the push is to do whatever is necessary to get the kid to pass. This starts in elementary, accelerates in middle and then when the kid gets to high he/she is brought up short. Pairing up is so conditioned that they do it almost automatically on the first day. Many also can't add a series of single digit numbers without a calculator.
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