How do I decide when to introduce cooperative learning into a unit or lesson?
• How about the beginning, the middle or the end? There are, in fact, cooperative strategies for all aspects of a lesson, though it is not necessary to use them exclusively. • Some are designed to elicit prior knowledge from students such as KWL; others help students integrate knowledge as it is introduced such as Think, Pair, Share; some help students in a group learn pieces of material and then teach it to others in order to facilitate the learning more quickly such as Jigsaw; and some strategies help students summarize and pull together what they have learned in the lesson such as One Minute Papers. • It’s important to have as large a repertoire of cooperative strategies as possible so that you will be able to find the appropriate strategy or activity for the lesson at hand. • Having clear goals for instruction will also greatly help you figure out which strategies to use and when. • Whenever I try to put students into groups they just get rowdier. How do I get the students to behav
