From the European Student’s Union Student Centred Learning Toolkit (p.8):

“

An Increased Motivation to Learn:

… Knowledge retention differs depending on the way in which material is learned, but all types of active learning show a higher retention rate than traditional forms of learning…

”

The pyramid might as well have represented the amount of time allotted these activities in a Cooperative Learning classroom – the ones providing highest retention, i.e.  teaching others, practical doing and discussion at the bottom of the pyramid also form the foundation of even the simplest CLIPs; walking around in Catch1Partner, partner A gets 3 minutes to present how he arrived at his solution to a mathematical problem, and Partner B gives 2 minutes worth of feedback while repeating the process, then roles are reversed, voilà, 10 minutes of teaching others, practical doing and discussion while learning social skills at the same time – see related post.

Let students do that twice and all your students have been engaged for 20 minutes while you have been walking around, monitoring the presentations and discussions to get an x-ray of their learning process. If Cooporative Learning is not the simplest and least chaotic way to move towards a more Student Centred Learning classroom, what is?