Based on the office of research (1992), cooperative learning is a successful teaching strategy for each student of different levels of ability in small teams, using various learning activities to improve their understanding of a subject. Each member of a team is responsible not only for learning what is taught but also for helping teammates learn and creating an atmosphere of achievement” (The office of research, 1992). 

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Here, I list all characteristics of a successful cooperative learning:  

  1. Students work together in small groups containing three to five members 
  1. Students are positively interdependent
  1. Students need to accomplish their own common tasks or structured learning activities
  1. Students are individually accountable for their work or learning  
  1. Group processing for their final goals 
  1. Positive social skills in promotive interaction 
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The prepared topic of our group is to explain the basic R language and simple programming of RStudio for young students. I think cooperative learning is in line with the teaching goals in our group, which is the most important part when we prepare to teach. For example, the first goal of our group is to make young students understand why they should learn the R language and the wide range of uses of RStudio in the future. In cooperative learning, my team members and I need to prepare a lot of materials to introduce the actual use and the development of the R language to make each group member clearly understand that RStudio is the main programming tool in many research and analysis tasks. Like us as teachers, students should also have the process of cooperative learning in their own group studies. 

If you want to learn more about the common strategy of cooperative learning roles in the classroom, I strongly recommend you to listen to the 60 second Youtube video linked below. This is a very good resource, which is more practical than what I have said here. 

I have also embedded a summary video below, which more simply defines the cooperative teaching structure. The video also shows some strategies on how to create groups and classroom examples, such as think-pair-share and jigsaw. 

Reference

Edutopia. (2018, November 2). 60 Second-Strategy: Cooperative learning Roles [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR6rTKPkjgQ 

Teachings in Education. (2017, October 5). Cooperative Learning Model: Strategies & Examples [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/cnkKHL_dyGE

The Office of Research. (1992). Education Research Consumer Guide. The Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) of the U.S. Department of Education. https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/OR/ConsumerGuides/cooplear.html