Gifted Education and Cooperative Learning: A Miss or a Match?

ing with teachers who work with gifted students, I got the distinct impression tomato throwing was imminent. The experience certainly reinforced the discord that seems to exist between proponents of cooperative learning and those who advocate for the gifted and talented. At best, educators of the gifted have been cautioned to approach the cooperative learning bandwagon with “caution. ” Is this trepidation warranted? Are the goals of cooperative learning inconsistent with the needs of gifted students? Is cooperative learning simply misunderstood or truly a mismatch? As I progressed through my own preservice teaching preparation program in the mid-1990s, I was indoctrinated with cooperative learning as a mainstay in my instructional arsenal. Johnson, Johnson, and Smith (1991) synthesized more than 375 studies on the effect of cooperative, competitive, and individualistic efforts on student achievement and productivity and concluded that cooperative learning results in more higher level reasoning, more frequent generation of new ideas and solutions, and greater transfer of what is learned within one situation to another. Cooperative learning also promotes academic achievement, increases retention, and vastly improves student self-esteem and communication (Johnson & Johnson, 1989). When I began my teaching career, I was caught unaware when I encountered rumblings of dissension from gifted preteens and their parents after employing cooperative learning techniques in my classroom. It was, quite frankly, a harbinger of things to come, and not unlike the reaction I received in my aforementioned conference chat with gifted and talented teachers. To arrive at common ground, one must first isolate those areas of difference between the two camps. Perhaps the greatest contention lies in the debate over heterogeneous versus homogeneous grouping (Allan, 1991; Gallagher & Coleman, 1994; Robinson, 1990; SaponShevin & Schniedewind, 1993). With tracking and similar practices falling into disfavor with most reformers, a growing majority of elementary, middle, and secondary schools are becoming staunch adherents of mixed ability groups for instruction, thereby making cooperative learning a desirable strategy. As an example, 80% of Texas elementary principals report all-day use of mixed ability groupings within their buildings (elementary teachers use cooperative learning strategies 75% of the time); 51% of middle school principals cite mixed ability for everything but reading and math; and 56% of high school principals report all-day mixed ability groupings across the board (Texas Center for Educational Research, 2001). Gifted students, however, often feel exploited when cooperative learning is used as a predominate method of instruction and groups are configured heterogeneously (Coleman, 1994; Mills & Durden, 1992; Robinson, 1991). Fiedler, Lange, and Winebrenner (2002) likewise believe heterogeneous grouping may have negative side effects both on the gifted student and on the others in the classroom. Average or low-ability students may see their “perceptions of themselves as competent, capable learners suffer” (Fiedler et al., p. 110). Gifted