Co-operative Learning

"Students learn more effectively when they work cooperatively." (Johnson and Johnson, 1988)

As stated by Curriculum for Excellence on their views on collaborative learning:
"We no longer consider that a 'good' classroom is necessarily a quiet one; we undestand that learning is frequently most effective when the learners have the opportunity to think and talk together, to discuss ideas, question, analyse and solve problems, without the constant mediation of the teacher."
They also state that this view heavily derives from the work of Lev Vygotsky and his theories of learning as a social process. This links in with Johnson and Johnson's view above. By working together, I believe that both adults and children can share ideas and learn from one another. This was certainly the case within our co-operative learning group.

As previously blogged upon, I believe Keira, Caroline and I worked very well together throughout this project. We each took an active role in every stage of the development of our team work and, thus, produced some great results of which we were all very proud - especially our movie! As stated by Johnson and Johnson (1989), collaborative learning has advantages of:
- Higher achievement and greater productivity are obtained.
-More caring, supportive and committed relationships are formed.
- Greater psychological health, social competence and self esteem.
Each of these traits was reflected within our collaborative practice as, I feel, we have all bonded over the highs and lows of the experience and achieved a much better result incorporating everyone's ideas, than we would have done had this been an individual task.

Our changing society means that, as well as teaching children the social skills of physical collaboration (sharing, turn taking, communication etc.), we also need to introduce them to the key concept of effective online collaboration. As stated by Donelan, Kear and Ramage (2010): "Skills in online communication and collaboration are particularly important for the modern workplace, where teams may include people in different offices, different sites or even different countries." They then go on to further discuss effective online communication and collaboration which I am eager to learn more about with further reading of their text.

Donelan, H., Kear, K. and Ramage, M. (2010) Online Communication and Collaboration. Milton Keynes: Routledge.
Johnson, R. and Johnson, D. (1988) Cooperative Learning. Available: www.context.org/ICLIB/IC18/Johnson.htm