Professors need to ensure that members of each cooperative learning group discuss how well they are achieving their goals and maintaining effective working relationships. Groups need to describe how a group member's actions are helpful and unhelpful and make decisions about what to continue or change. Such processing enables groups to focus on group maintainance, facilitates the learning of collaborative skills, ensures that members receive feedback on their participation, and reminds students to practice collaborative skills consistently. Some of the keys to successful processing are allowing sufficient time for it to take place, making it specific rather than vague, maintaining student involvement in processing, reminding students to use their teamwork skills during processing, and ensuring that students are clear about the process that has been communicated. In order for professors to use cooperative learning routinely, they must identify course routines and generic lessons that repeat over and over again and structure them cooperatively.
Problem solving lessons are one good example of a repeated practice.