CooPEratIVe LeaRNing!!

WHAT IS COOPERATIVE LEARNING?

Cooperative learning is a successful teaching strategy in which small teams, each with students of different levels of ability, use a variety of learning activities to improve their understanding of a subject.

Cooperative learning is an organized and structured way to use small groups to enhance student learning and interdependence. Students are given an assignment, and they work together to accomplish this task. Each individual has responsibilities and is held accountable for aiding in the completion of the assignment.

Cooperative learning is sometimes thought of simply as 'group work,' but groups of students working together might not be working collaboratively.

5 ELEMENT OF COOPERATIVE LEARNING

There are five fundamental elements involved in cooperative learning. In fact, these five elements distinguish cooperative learning from other forms of group learning. When all of these elements are present in a learning situation, the result is a cooperative learning group. The five basic elements of cooperative learning are: 

 Positive interdependence, Individual and group accountability, Interpersonal and small group skills , Face-to-face interaction  and Group processing.

1) Positive  Interdependence

Students have the sense that they're 'in this together,' feeling that each member's individual effort will not only help him, but the whole group. The grade of each student is dependent upon the effort of other group members. The key to positive interdependence is committing to personal success as well as the success of every member of the group.

2) Individual and Group Accountability 

Each student is accountable for their own contribution to the group. Clearly described goals ensure that each student knows what she is responsible for and what the group is responsible for. No one can "hitchhike" on the work of others. The performance of each individual must be assessed and the results given back to the group.

3) Interpersonal And Small Group Skills

Interpersonal and small group skills are required to function as part of a group. These are basic teamwork skills. Group members must know how to be motivated and  provide effective leadership, make decisions, build trust, communicate, and manage conflict.

• Completing tasks
• Communicating
• Decision making
• Managing conflict
• Appreciating group members

4) Face to Face Interaction

Students are promoting each other’s' learning through face-to-face activities where they discuss and explain assignment topics with each other. This means that students promote each other's success by sharing resources. They help, support, encourage, and praise each other's efforts to learn. Both academic and personal support is part of this mutual goal. 

5) Group Processing

Students are given a means for analyzing their group for how well the group has learned, and whether or not collaborative skills are being used. Group members need to feel free to communicate openly with each other to express concerns as well as to celebrate accomplishments. 

FOUR TYPES OF COOPERATIVE LEARNING

1) Student Teams-Achievement Divisions (STAD)

A cooperative learning method for mixed-ability groupings involving team recognition and group responsibility for individual learning.

Students are assigned in teams that are mixed in performance level, gender, and ethnicity. The teacher presents a lesson, and then students work within their teams to make sure that all team members have mastered the lesson. Finally, all students take individual quizzes on the material, at which time they may not help one another.

Students’ quiz scores are compared to their own past averages, and points are awarded on the basis of the degree to which students meet or exceed their own earlier performance.

The STAD method is most appropriate for teaching well-defined objectives with single right answers, such as mathematical computations, language usage and mechanics, geography and map skills, and science facts and concept.

2) Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (CIRC)

A comprehensive program for teaching reading and writing in the upper elementary grades; students work in four-member cooperative learning teams.

Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (CIRC) is a comprehensive program for teaching, reading and writing in the upper elementary grades. Students work in four-member cooperative learning teams. They engage in a series of activities with one another, including reading , making predictions about how narrative stories will come out, summarizing stories, practicing spelling, decoding, and vocabulary.

They also work together to master main ideas and other comprehension skills. Three studies of the CIRC program have found positive effects on students’ reading skills, including improved scores on standardized reading and language tests.

3) RECIPROCAL TEACHING

Brown & Paliscar (1982) developed reciprocal teaching. It is a cooperative technique that allows for student pairs to participate in a dialogue about text. Partners take turns reading and asking questions of each other, receiving immediate feedback.

 Students to use important metacognitive techniques such as clarifying, questioning, predicting, and summarizing. It embraces the idea that students can effectively learn from each other.

4) THINK, PAIR AND SHARE

Think-Pair-Share allows for students to contemplate a posed question or problem silently. The student may write down thoughts or simply just brainstorm in his or her head. When prompted, the student pair up with a peer and discusses his or her idea(s) and then listens to the ideas of his or her partner. 

When teachers use this technique they don't have to worry about students not volunteering because each student will already have an idea in their heads, therefore, the teacher can call on anyone and increase discussion productivity.

SeLf IntROduCTion!!

Self Introduction!!!

Name: Vimala Dewi D/O Kanesan

Age: 20 years old

Birth Date: 05/04/1995

Gender: Female

Email address: vimaladewi64@yahoo.com

Birth place: Hospital Bukit Mertajam

Citizenship: Malaysian

Status: Single

Occupation: Teacher

Language spoken: Malay,English and Tamil

Primary School: SK Convent BM

Secondary School: SMK Convent BM

Hobbies:listening to music and reading love novel

My Goals: I have my own goal that is to educate, to inspire, to learn and to affect positive change in student and I want my student to enjoy my teaching style through learning process.

My Philosophy:  As a teacher i will support my students with full heart and motivating them to achieve what they really want in their life. I’m not going to give up my efforts on teaching the students who is in weak category. I always boost my student confidence level.

Favourite subject: History

Favourite food and drink: Kuoy teow goreng and Lemon Tea

Life Quotes: The good life is one inspired by love and giuded by knowledge.

Pedagogy

What is Pedagogy?

Pedagogy is the art, science or profession of teaching.

Pedagogy is the discipline that deals with the theory and practice of education. It thus concerns the study and practice of how best to teach. Its aims range from the general (full development of the human being via liberal education) to the narrower specifics of vocational education (the imparting and acquisition of specific skills).

The term is primarily used for individuals who occupy jobs in pre-school education(such as kindergarten and nurseries) . But a pedagogue can occupy various kinds of jobs, e.g. in retirement homes, prisons, orphanages, and human resource management. These are often recognised as social pedagogues as they perform on behalf of society.

Based on my perception about pedagogy is pedagogue's job is usually distinguished from a teacher's by primarily focusing on teaching children life-preparing knowledge such as social skills and cultural norms. There is also a very big focus on care and well-being of the child. Many pedagogical institutions also practice social inclusion. The pedagogue's work also consists of supporting the child in their mental and social development.

Behavioral School Of Thought

What is Behavioral?

Behaviorism is an approach to psychology that focuses on an individual's behavior. It combines elements of philosophy, methodology, and psychological theory. It emerged in the early twentieth century as a reaction to depth psychology and other more traditional forms of psychology, which often had difficulty making predictions that could be tested using rigorous experimental methods.

theoretical frameworks was develop in the early century 20th with the animal learning experiment of Ivan Pavlor, Edward Thondike, Edward C. Tolman, B.F.Skinner and others.

Behavior In Education

Behaviourism focuses on one particular view of learning: a change in external behaviour achieved through using reinforcement to shape the behavior. Skinner found that behaviors could be shaped when the use of rewards was implemented. Desired behavior is rewarded, while the undesired behavior is punished. Incorporating behaviorism into the classroom allowed educators to assist their students in excelling both academically and personally. In the field of language learning, this type of teaching was called the audio-lingual method, characterised by the whole class using choral chanting of key phrases, dialogues and immediate correction.

Within the behaviourist view of learning, the "teacher" is the dominant person in the classroom and takes complete control, evaluation of learning comes from the teacher who decides what is right or wrong. The learner does not have any opportunity for evaluation or reflection within the learning process, they are simply told what is right or wrong. The conceptualization of learning using this approach could be considered "superficial" as the focus is on external changes in behaviour i.e. not interested in the internal processes of learning leading to behaviour change and has no place for the emotions involved the process.

Operant Conditioning

Operant conditioning was developed by B.F. Skinner in 1937 and deals with the modification of "voluntary behavior" or operant behavior. Operant behavior operates on the environment and is maintained by its consequences. Reinforcement and punishment, the core tools of operant conditioning, are either positive (delivered following a response), or negative (withdrawn following a response). Skinner created the Skinner Box or operant conditioning chamber to test the effects of operant conditioning principles on rats. From this study, he discovered that the rats learned very effectively if they were rewarded frequently. Skinner also found that he could shape the rats' behavior through the use of rewards, which could, in turn, be applied to human learning as well.

Classical Conditioning

Although operant conditioning plays the largest role in discussions of behavioral mechanisms, classical conditioning is also an important behavior-analytic process that need not refer to mental or other internal processes. Pavlov's experiments with dogs provide the most familiar example of the classical conditioning procedure. In simple conditioning, the dog was presented with a stimulus such as a light or a sound, and then food was placed in the dog's mouth. After a few repetitions of this sequence, the light or sound by itself caused the dog to salivate. Although Pavlov proposed some tentative physiological processes that might be involved in classical conditioning, these have not been confirmed. The idea of classical conditioning helped behaviorist John Watson discover the key mechanism behind how humans acquire the behaviors that they do, which was to find a natural reflex that produces the response being considered.

Social Learning

 Social learning is also called observational learning. Its main tenet is that you can learn a lot by watching others. According to its chief theorist, Bandura (1986), for observational learning to be effective, learners must attend to someone’s behavior, retain what they observed the “model” doing, imitate or reproduce the behavior they saw, and experience reinforcement or satisfaction as a consequence. We know learners are most likely to model persons who are somewhat like themselves and whom they perceive as competent, warm, or powerful. Thus, primary children frequently identify with parents or with television or movie characters, especially superheroes, and mimic what they do.

Social learning also occurs when we see something good or bad happen to another person. For example, if we were to see a friend praised for her schoolwork, we might try to imitate what she does so we can be praised, too. Conversely, we might avoid doing what another student does if her behavior is not well received. 

Humanistic School Of Thought

What is Humanistic?

Promotes personal development which includes values clarification,moral,character education and multicultural education.

Humanistic psychology was instead focused on each individual's potential and stressed the importance of growth and self-actualization. The fundamental belief of humanistic psychology is that people are innately good and that mental and social problems result from deviations from this natural tendency.

Humanism also suggests that people possess personal agency and that they are motivated to use this free will to pursue things that will help them achieve their full potential as human beings. This need for fulfillment and personal growth is a key motivator of all behavior. People are continually looking for new ways to grow, to become better, to learn new things, and to experience psychological growth and self-actualization.

Beliefs in Humanistic School

 The humanistic school holds several core beliefs:

• Having good feelings about oneself is essential to positive personal development and may

Enhance academic achievement. Therefore, engender in students a sense of self-respect,

Self-worth, and efficacy, or having a feeling of control over one’s life and destiny.

• Having good feelings about others is also essential to healthy development. Thus, aspire

to help learners build respect for and accept others, even when their opinions and behavior may be different.

• The school should be made to fit the child rather than the child made to fit the school. Children learn best what they want to know when they are self-directed. Therefore, personalize education by giving learners considerable latitude in deciding what to do (learn) and how to do it. Relatedly, create an environment that provides choices and then help students make choices that seem wise to them.

• The school and classroom environment must help youth satisfy such essential human needs as personal safety and security, love, belonging, and achievement and autonomy, competence, and social relationships. Failure to meet these needs will be counterproductive to personal development and will have a negative impact on learning.

• Accept learners as they are, that is, with their unique behaviors, feelings, and opinions.

• Place yourself “in the shoes” of learners in order to see and understand a learning  situation from the students’ perspective.

• Use techniques that help learners better understand their feelings and values. Such techniques include active listening, invitational learning, and values clarification—all of which are discussed in the following section.

• Knowing how to learn is more important than acquiring knowledge.

Cognitive School Of Thought

WHAT IS COGNITIVE?


Cognition is the set of all mental abilities and processes related to knowledge, attention, memory judgement and evaluation, reasoning, problem solving and decision making, and production of language.

Human cognition is conscious and unconscious, concrete or abstract, as well as intuitive (like knowledge of a language) and conceptual (like a model of a language). Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and generate new knowledge.



Bloom Taxanomy

There are six major categories of cognitive an processes, starting from the simplest to the most complex.

Remembering: Recall or retrieve previous learned information.

Examples: Recite a policy. Recite the safety rules. Flash card.

Understanding: Comprehending the meaning, translation, interpolation, and interpretation of instructions and problems. State a problem in one's own words.

Examples: Rewrite the principles of test writing. Explain in one's own words the steps for performing a complex task. Translate an equation into a computer spreadsheet. Note taking.

Applying: Use a concept in a new situation or unprompted use of an abstraction. Applies what was learned in the classroom into novel situations in the work place.

Examples: Use a manual to calculate an employee's vacation time. Apply laws of statistics to evaluate the reliability of a written test.

Analyzing: Separates material or concepts into component parts so that its organizational structure may be understood. Distinguishes between facts and inferences.

Examples: Troubleshoot a piece of equipment by using logical deduction. Recognize logical fallacies in reasoning. Gathers information from a department and selects the required tasks for training. Questioning what had happened.

Evaluating: Make judgments about the value of ideas or materials.

Examples: Select the most effective solution. Hire the most qualified candidate. Explain and justify a new budget. Survey and blogging.

Creating: Builds a structure or pattern from diverse elements. Put parts together to form a whole, with emphasis on creating a new meaning or structure.

Examples: Write a company operations or process manual. Design a machine to perform a specific task. Integrates training from several sources to solve a problem. Revises and process to improve the outcome. Write an essay.