Using Cooperative Learning In A Sixth Grade Math Classroom

In this action research study of my classroom of sixth grade mathematics, I investigated the impact of cooperative learning on the engagement, participation, and attitudes of my students. I also investigated the impact of cooperative learning upon my own teaching. I discovered that my students not only preferred to learn in cooperative groups, but that their levels of engagement and participation, their attitudes toward math, and their quality of work all improved greatly. My teaching also changed, and I found that I began to enjoy teaching more. As a result of this research, I plan to continue and expand the amount of cooperative group work that happens in my classroom. Cooperative Learning 1 The sixth grade class that I had this year was one of the most challenging classes that I had ever had. My students had home issues. They had behavior issues. They had learning difficulties. They lacked self-control and social skills. Yet, as I got to know them and began to see them as individuals, I kept noticing not only how much I LIKED all of them but also how much potential they had. Unfortunately, their issues made it extremely difficult to keep the classroom a place where learning was more important than behavior control. When this school year started I had a recurring fantasy. I would sprinkle a magic powder into the school lunches of my students, and they would suddenly start to exercise self-control and begin thinking about the choices they made, even the little choices like blurting out every comment that came into their heads. They would become interested in their own learning and start paying attention in class and doing their homework. The constant tattling would stop—not only because the tattlers would start minding their own business, but also because the guilty ones would be keeping their hands to themselves, not kicking in the halls, not stealing pencils. They would be respectful to adults, other students, and themselves. I would not have to say everything 19 times. I wanted to have a classroom where my students were engaged and could participate in more open-ended problem-solving activities. I wanted them to be able to learn in cooperative groups, find answers, understand where those answers came from, and be able to communicate that information to me and to each other. Most importantly, they would start learning as deeply as I thought they were capable of learning, and I could really see them begin to reach their potential. For that to happen, I needed them to be able to control their behavior, be interested and willing to work, and able and willing to communicate with each other. Unfortunately, at the beginning of this year, I was dealing constantly with the negative behaviors that I described in the paragraph above. When I taught math, about half of the students would listen, usually a different half every time. I was wondering if the problem with communication was coming from my not communicating effectively. When I did pull in a problem-solving activity, it seemed like my lowability students became really engaged, but my higher-level students wanted to write down an answer and then tune out. Even with my lower-ability students engaged, they still struggled with the mechanics of communicating with me about the assignment. These lower students either could not write, did not know math facts, or lost the paper before they could hand it in. I also had a couple of students with math phobias who panicked and shut down at the first sign of anything new. It seemed like the more capable students had quit because they could not get the attention that they needed, and others had learned that being quiet and not causing trouble would be rewarded. The students who struggled dealt with so many other issues that I wondered if they just did not want to bother anymore. I was sure these students had heard that they had a bad reputation, and I wondered if there was a bit of a “Well, everyone thinks we’re bad anyway” mentality. Since my district has switched to a new reading program requiring extensive training and planning time, my time for math preparation was ridiculously short this year. Due to these circumstances, I was not planning effectively for my math period at the beginning of the year. On top of that, my school was preparing for a December move to a new school building, so most of my furniture and supplies were already packed and in storage before the school year began. I was also dealing with my students’ issues almost daily—social services, absenteeism, parent issues, behavior problems, and special education issues, to name a few. While I was dealing with these issues, I felt myself wearing out, and I was wondering if teaching really was meant as my life-long profession. I did not feel like I was being effective or doing my best teaching, and the pressures of a stressful school year were making me wonder if any of this was worth it at all. I was hoping that this research would help me become more effective and remind me of why I chose this profession in the first place. I was hoping to find positive results with this project for both my students and myself. Talking with other Math in the Middle teachers during the past two years, listening to teachers in my building discuss their work, and interacting with other educators at workshops had convinced me that I was not alone in my frustrations. I was not the only teacher seeing students coming to school with more and more baggage, but more importantly, I was questioning my expectations. I heard so many times from veteran teachers that “students used to be so much better/different/more responsible/more selfcontrolled/more respectful. ” In reflecting on those conversations, I could not help but think that somehow I was communicating my frustration to students without realizing it. Maybe the way I used to teach was not the best way to teach these “new types” of students. Maybe if I could change what I did in my classroom just a little, I could make a dent in the problem—even when I could not improve a student’s crummy home life or their poverty or their having to spend weeks or months in Mexico during the school year. My problem—with this year’s class especially—was really strongly related to the issue of equity in the National Council of Teachers of Math (NCTM) standards. These students deserved to be held to the same high expectations as the students I had taught in the past. They deserved my and their future teachers’ best teaching—even if that teaching had to look different from here on out. Communication was another standard that needed to be addressed in my math classroom because the group I had this year did not seem to understand really basic rules about respect, self-control, or communicating with both adults and peers. This affected my teaching, which affected their learning, which affected their assessment.and the ball kept rolling down the hill. In mathematics specifically, my students struggled to work together, to communicate what they knew, and to demonstrate any behavior that would aid their learning. This affected their ability to make connections, problem solve, and perform well at any of the NCTM content standards. These basic problems caused my students to struggle with every single standard in the NCTM document, and they would continue to struggle unless I could find a way to intervene. LITERATURE REVIEW At the beginning of this study, cooperative learning brought to my mind pictures of students working in groups with cute little titles—reporter, noise monitor, writer, checker, etc. Upon further research, however, I found cooperative learning to be much broader. Several themes emerged during my study of cooperative learning literature: a more clear and detailed definition of cooperative learning, the rationale behind the development of cooperative learning, benefits of cooperative learning, considerations for lower-achievers, and cautions and concerns for teachers implementing cooperative learning. Definition of cooperative learning Cooperative learning is described by Slavin (1984), one of the leading developers of cooperative learning, as a set of instructional methods in which students are encouraged and required to work together on academic tasks. Cooperative learning methods may be as simple as having students sit together to discuss or help one another with classroom tasks, or they may be quite complex. They may use group rewards, as in group contingencies, or may not do so. (p. 31) Students might be assigned a specific role and be responsible for a specific part of a project, or they might just work together without having separate tasks. Kagan, perhaps one of the most well-known cooperative learning researchers, said in an interview with Brandt (1989) that cooperative learning is “curriculum free. The choice of a structure does not involve choice of any particular curriculum or curriculum materials, in fact, the structures can be used from kindergarten through university across the curriculum” (p. 10). In other words, cooperative learning can be used with any class, and just about any objective can be taught through a cooperative group activity. In cooperative learning, while the group may be working together, each individual within the group is still accountable for learning the material. Heterogeneous teams almost always characterize cooperative learning organization, and the groups are usually very carefully planned to include all levels of learners. Interestingly, Good, Reys, Grouws, and Mirvan (1989) researched effective implementations of cooperative learning, and their findings led them to recommend that teachers NOT assign students roles in their groups. They found in their research that the roles were frustrating for students and teachers, so my conception of cooperative learning was not even a recommended model. The development of cooperative learning Kagan told Brandt (1989) during an interview that he became i