The authors: Jean Schumaker, Associate Director, Center for Research on Learning, and Sue Vernon, Edge Enterprises. This article originally appeared in the March 2000 issue of Strategram, a newsletter for SIM teachers.
Return to Article ArchiveTwo of the biggest challenges facing today's educators are building safe, caring learning communities with students and teaching students how to treat each other such that everyone feels connected to and a part of the learning community. Recent events, such as those at Columbine High School in Colorado and other schools across the country, have underscored the fact that many students feel isolated and devalued by others in their schools.
A new instructional program from the Center for Research on Learning addresses these challenges. The Cooperative Thinking Strategies Series, for teaching students skills to participate in group situations and for building learning communities, is now complete. The series includes five instructor's manuals specially designed to help students think and work together in caring, positive, and productive ways.
The first manual in the series focuses on the SCORE Skills, five basic social skills that students need to work in cooperative groups. These skills are
Once the SCORE Skills have been taught, the teacher can choose one of four cooperative thinking strategies for the next set of lessons. The THINK Strategy is a strategy students use to solve problems together. The LEARN Strategy is used by students to master information together. The BUILD Strategy is designed for analyzing and resolving controversial issues within a group. Finally, the Teamwork Strategy is used by students to work together on a project.
The whole series has been designed to enable teachers to teach students the skills associated with higher-order thinking, teamwork, and community building and to help students meet district and state standards in these areas. Such skills often are difficult to teach because very few structured curricula are available in these areas. They also are difficult to teach because of the abstract nature of higher-order thinking processes and the complexity inherent in getting groups of children with a variety of skills and backgrounds to productively work together.
Therefore, this series has been built upon tried and true instructional principles. Each Cooperative Thinking Strategy is a special sequence of cognitive behaviors, and students learn to use this sequence within a very structured set of lessons. Across a series of six lessons in each instructor's manual, students gradually learn and practice each step in a strategy until they are performing all of the steps in the final lesson together. From that point on, they are ready to practice applying the strategy to subject-area information.
To make them maximally useful, the strategies were designed to be generic; that is, they can be applied to any subject-area content. Thus, they can be taught in conjunction with content in general education classes such as social studies, history, science, and literature classes. They also can be applied to current local or national events or to personal problems or issues the students are encountering in their own lives.
Teachers can choose to emphasize the SCORE Skills and one Cooperative Thinking Strategy during a school year, or they can teach several or all of the strategies across the whole year. A team of teachers can each teach one of the strategies and then reinforce use of all of the strategies across the school year. Regardless of the number of strategies taught, students need to practice each of the strategies in a wide variety of situations.
The Cooperative Thinking Strategies Series has been created for heterogeneous classes of students, including students with disabilities. The original development of the strategies was conceived after researchers at the Center for Research on Learning formally observed cooperative group work in many classrooms as part of a large, federally funded project on social skills instruction in classrooms. What they found was disappointing and worrisome. Students with disabilities who had been enrolled in inclusive classrooms were being put down, verbally abused, ignored, shamed, and left out of discussions during cooperative group activities. Moreover, few of the students appeared to know how to work with each other in positive, productive ways. They lacked the basic skills needed to complete fundamental cooperative tasks, and when they were asked to do high-order thinking tasks together, very little was accomplished.
The THINK, LEARN, and BUILD strategy manuals are available from Edge Enterprises, PO Box 1304, Lawrence, KS 66044. (785) 749-1473.
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