Chapter 1: American Culture provides few opportunites to learn group work. This book will establish theories of group work to help students establish a firmer grasp on there education.
I have read this same ideal from other educational books and the csusm education dept.
With this established, I question why, with all this push to have more group work in school, why dont we see it.
Chapter 2: Cooperative learning is an affective strategy in helping studentsunderstand and retain information as well as improving their basic skills. Group work can help EL students understand English better and help ito integrate and desegregate classrooms.
My experiance as a substitute teacher has established that integration and paring students into groups to help EL learners is a mute point in many classroom that have massive majorities of EL students.
I do wonder that if grouping is based on the best outcome of pairing strong and weak students together, what happens if you have classes of only weak students. How does one pair them.
Chapter 3: This chapter is about finding equality and equity within the group setting without having groups dominated by individual students that are not thinking in terms of working together to answer the academic questions.
I am curous to discover how long teachers must profile their class before grouping their individual students together.
To be an effective teacher in the 21st century, can one not group students to perform academic work?
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I wonder why we don't see it too. I think there are two primary reasons, one it is hard to do well. Actually, I should say it is hard to learn how to do it well. Once a teacher has it, it is simply natural & easy. The second is that trust of students we spoke to early in the course. Do we trust students to be responsible, to have some freedoms, to think on their own? As you think of grouping students, think about the sections on "multiple abilities". I challenge you to start seeing students in all the ways they each are amazingly smart. A "weak student" might only mean someone who is so smart as to see the crap better than all those around them, and have decided not to participate. Regarding planning for the groups--I think you will find the author says not to put too much worry or thought into that, just know how to manage the interactions and relationships that arise. I assume the last question is rhetorical? :)
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