Cooperative Learning, Groups in Action
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I had the pleasure of joining about 40 teachers last week for a three day workshop on Creating Effective Groups (Social Theory) led by Barrie Bennett . “The key focus in this session is to shift effective group work beyond the idea of Cooperative Learning.” Although I am not a classroom teacher, I saw tremendous potential in this workshop for learning some new skills in facilitating groups. There are a lot of parallels between classroom group activities and staff meetings, committee meetings, and other group structures which I am familiar with. The beauty of this experience though is that I learned an awful lot about good teaching and the challenges teachers experience in their classrooms. I have gained a whole new appreciation for the complexity of good or great teaching. In this post I’ll highlight a few of the techniques we learned in the workshop. We learned about how and when to use… Placemat Think-pair-share Graffiti Ranking Ladder PMI (plus, mi