Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Cooperative Collaboration

I have been dealing with public school (or is it just school?) for the last twenty years advocating for my children. As a precedent, I lived through the Dade County public school system and its shortcomings. I always felt like an outsider. We were new to this country. My parents felt we were here “temporarily”. It was not their country or their customs or their language. My parents were happy to have me home being a good girl.

Any kind of involvement in school activities was always suspicious. I wanted to be a part of it all, but it was too difficult. Counselors were too busy with trouble makers or parents. The system was too big and complex then and it is a thousand times more complicated now.

This long winded opening brings me to my reflection of cooperative/collaborative learning. It just seems like such a dream concept. Cooperative/Collaborative learning seems ideal. Cooperative/Collaborative learning is the reason that I wanted to home school my children. It just seems so impossible in todays bogged down bureaucratic school system. I see teachers just barely making it, trying to keep up with all the data and record keeping along with all the other demands on them. Our system requires them to assess and record within the required parameters. The system is so big and with such demands, that it is constantly trying to come up with “fixes” that never seem to work. Maybe I am burned out before I begin…

Both cooperative and collaborative learning are founded on constructivism with the premise that knowledge is constructed, discovered and transformed by the student. It seems so simple. The idea that the students actively construct their own knowledge and actively seek it out is exciting. The brain activating existing cognitive structures or experiences to construct new ways to assimilate the new input only makes sense. Teachers and faculty putting time and effort into developing student’s competencies and talents seems like some fantasy school.

With all that said, the difference between collaborative and cooperative that makes cooperative seem more possible, if at all, is that in cooperative, the teacher maintains control of the class. The cooperative teacher poses specific problems or questions for the groups to answer. The answers are finite with a determined end product for assessment. The system needs quantitative, comparable records. On the other hand, the collaborative model seems even more out of my grasp of the realm of possibilities. What joy to envision my own children in such a learning environment where the groups would discover and direct the question to be posed and addressed. With the possibilities open ended, the students would develop a strong ownership for the process which would boost them on. What joyous environment for experimenting and learning. Assessment is negotiated by the group with the teacher. The possibilities of developing thinking processes seem endless. However, the reality of recording and reporting of assessment in a format that can be compared county wide, state wide, nation wide seems daunting.

So, since a teacher is a dreamer, we may as well dream of learning in an environment that deals with people with respect and highlights individual and group members’ abilities and contributions, acknowledging that there is always more to learn. This experience of collaboration with cooperative group members will serve the individual and society well in future encounters. I reinforce this “team” philosophy at home and apply the sports analogy. The quarterback or pitcher gets most of the glory, but in reality, they would be useless without the cooperative collaboration of the team.