I have been doing a great deal of coaching these past weeks before half term. Following sessions with a number of teachers at Norwich Primary Academy, Ms Horne, teacher in Year 3, kindly offered to describe some of her experiences after the first 2 hour block of a tailored Skills & Mastery session.
When working with teachers, I always wonder whether I am actually the one learning most about how to use Cooperative Learning. The content-free, versatile nature of the Cooperative Learning Interaction Patterns means that only one’s imagination sets the limits. Each individual teacher uses these CLIPs in his or her own unique way, a fusion between their personality, prior experience, educational background, subjects and even individual classes.*
In this short video, Ms Horne discusses her own use of Cooperative Learning and her thoughts on equal participation, confidence building, attainment and potential effect on teachers’workload at Norwich Primary Academy.
“We’ve used it across all subjects, it’s been brilliant…”
In the particular social skills exercise discussed, Word-Round was used to uncover the children’s definitions of key words such as trust and thoughtful.
The NPA gallery includes more pictures of the products referred to by Ms Horne.
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*) This is one of the main reasons I have begun to divert the staged social constructivism inherent in Cooperative Learning in the CPD sessions to let teachers share ideas, discuss difficulties and experiences in relation to practical lesson planning and implementation of CLIPs. It takes the necessity of teaching Cooperative Learning through Cooperative Learning to an entirely new level, as the examples are no longer from Maths or History – now the subject matter also includes Cooperative Learning, making the CPD even more powerful through sharing and meta-learning. Follow on twitter for more on this.
The refurbished werdelin.co.uk is the business end of cooperativelearning.works.
cooperativelearning.works 