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Managing & Supporting Cooperative Groups

Cooperative learning involves engaging intentional groupings of learners with a specific task to accomplish and distinct roles to play. In their roles, learners are accountable for their own learning and the group's collective learning outcomes. For this reason, when designing tasks and determining groups it is helpful to consider ways to support learners in the development of positive interdependence, individual and group accountability, promotive interaction, appropriate use of social skills, and group processing (Johnson & Johnson, 2009). The following considerations can help instructors to incorporate these elements and support meaningful cooperation among groups:

• Task-setting & group selection: Assign meaningful tasks that rely on cooperative output and require learners to manage various roles for success. To identify roles, consider the responsibilities each learner might take on to support the exchange of ideas and/or the management of work. Working with learners to identify their skills and preferences related to these roles and tasks can be useful in the creation of intentionally diverse and balanced groups. 
• Group norms: Engage learners in a deliberate discussion around practices for establishing and managing group norms and expectations to help establish trust and accountability and increase the effectiveness of the group.
• Small group skills: Explicitly discuss and support learners in practicing collaboration skills including active listening, concise communication, leadership, decision-making, and conflict management. Developing these skills can be just as important as achieving content-related outcomes within cooperative learning.
• Peer and instructor feedback/evaluation: Set up regular opportunities for groups and group members to provide feedback to each other and receive feedback from the instructor on both interpersonal performance and task-related outcomes. Doing this not only offers individual learners a place to voice concerns about their group dynamics, but also a place to reflect on individual contributions to the group, including their own.
• Collaborative workspaces: Whether learners are inside or outside of the classroom, consider using collaborative workspaces like , , or for groups to share information, interact and collaborate at any time. Contact the Instructional Technology Center for assistance.

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Activity Ideas

Cooperative learning can be utilized in a wide range of activities and tasks in any content area and, when integrating the digital collaborative workspaces listed above, any modality. Below are links to resources explaining some common activities that lend themselves well to the structure of cooperative learning. 

• Jigsaw: Learners work in different teams to first learn and then teach information, relying on other learners for collective knowledge.
• / : Learners are assigned specific perspectives or roles in order to stimulate critical thinking and discussion around complex topics.
• Resolution of Conflict: A cooperative learning method specifically designed to give learners structure to develop empathy and to identify and manage emotions through conflict.
• : Learners work together to read, annotate and respond to text in a variety of collaborative ways.

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