Cooperative Learning is a Brain Turn-On (continued)

Cooperative Groups Generate More Participation and Stimulate Multiple Brain Regions

Cooperative group activities, unlike whole class discussions or independent work, provide the most opportunities for students to express their ideas, questions, conclusions, and associations verbally. Gibbs (1995), in her book Tribesreported that in traditionally structured classes each student has about five to ten minutes of individual time to engage in classroom academic discourse. In group work, that amount of time increases dramatically. She found that students experienced a greater level of understanding of concepts and ideas when they talked, explained, and argued about them with their group, instead of just passively listening to a lecture or reading a text.

In addition, metabolic brain activity accelerates during active constructive thinking, such as planning, gathering data, analyzing, inferring, and strategizing versus passive information acquisition. When the verbal center becomes engaged while information or a task is being learned, more neural activity travels between the left and right brain. (Chugani & Phelps, 1991). Thus, when students describe their thinking verbally to the group or work on a group chart, diagram, or project, the new information becomes embedded in multiple brain sites, such as the auditory and visual memory storage areas. Now, with neuroimaging, we know that this multicentered brain communication circuitry enhances comprehension, making new material be more accessible for future use, because it is stored in redundant brain areas (Giedd, et al., 1999).

In mathematical collaboration, students learn to test one anothers conjectures and identify valid or invalid solutions. Group members are all engaged as they discover techniques to test one members strategy. If it does not work on repeated tries, they invalidate that strategy and try another. Students who just dont get itvia a teachers didactic lecture benefit from the different perspectives of classmates with similar knowledge banks on the subject.

In literature and social studies, students have a small, safer place to try out ideas they might not express to the entire class. They learn that there is validity to personal interpretation, and they can experiment with critical thinking in a structured small-group setting, with scaffolding provided as needed via teacher prompts about what to discuss and how to run the discussion. This process empowers students to become more active not only in whole-class discussions, but also in their homework and in speaking their opinion outside of the classroom. This is especially critical during adolescence when fitting in is such a strong need that individuality can become stifled (Jernigan & Tallal, 1990).

As neuroimaging evidence has shown, the more a student is engaged in a learning activity, especially of the brain are actively stimulated (Jagust & Budinger, 1993). When this occurs in a positive emotional setting, without stress and anxiety, the result is greater long-term, relational, and retrievable learning.

What Constitutes Cooperative Work?

To qualify as cooperative work, rather than individuals working in parallel in a group, students must need each other to complete the task. Students are expected to participate in tasks that are clearly constructed and necessary for the groups success. The teacher remains active as a circulating resource and, when necessary, an arbitrator, but students should be capable of carrying out their tasks without constant, direct intrusion by the teacher. Students, not the teacher, are responsible for accomplishing their tasks in the way they think best, with accountability to each other and to the teachers standards. Ideally, there is a clear rubric for individual and group assessment, and the students and the teacher take part in the assessment process (Antil, Jenkins, & Watkins, 1998).

When setting up lessons for successful collaboration in cooperative groups, consider the following guidelines that will then be expanded upon with examples of specific cooperative group activities that emphasize each of the five characteristics.

• All members have opportunities and capabilities, frontloaded if necessary, such that different students can make their own special contributions. This may require planning ways for students with different learning or intelligence styles to make special contributions to the group task (Webb, Nemer, & Chizhik, 1998).
  
• Students learn to respect each other as group members. Often this requires teacher demonstration with role-playing.
  
• The group negotiates roles with guidance from the teacher. Designated roles can vary from group to group depending on the nature of the task assigned.
  
• There should be more than one answer or more than one way to solve the problem or create the project.
  
• The activity should be intrinsically interesting, challenging, and rewarding.

Sample Brain-Friendly Cooperative Projects

Cooperative group activities I have used in my middle school classes have had different emphases and goals, but each also conforms to these basic five characteristics of successful group work. Examples of activities that feature each of the aforementioned successful cooperative group guidelines follow.

All members have opportunities to make valued contributions to the group product

Dinosaur ExtinctionScience and Math (extinction theory and scientific notation):

In this activity students are each given an area of expertise that other group members do not have so they are valued for this information. This is a type of frontloading. This increases each students connection to the group socially and academically, thereby lowering their affective filters. Because there are elements of choice and real-world application, the information students process is patterned with relational memories in the hippocampus and prefrontal lobes for successful storage as long-term memory.

In the dinosaur project, the final process of making informed individual decisions about which extinction theory the student chooses to support brings in frontal lobe executive functions. The group project also incorporates and values multiple skills and talents. This results in more opportunity for students to connect and succeed through their individual learning styles and to engage more of their brains with multisensory stimulation.

Through a strategy called tea party, card party, or jigsaw, students are first put in groups where all five members of the group read articles and text about one of the dinosaur extinction theories, which include:

• Creataceous-Tertiary Asteroid Theory(about 65 million years ago): This theory also previews the next topic we will study in geography, continental drift, and the splitting of the supercontinent Pangaea.
  
• K-T Extinction(about 65 million years ago): K is for Kreide, meaning chalk in German, which describes the chalky sediment layer from that time; T is for Tertiary, the next geologic period, when all land animals over about 55 pounds went extinct.
  
• The Alvarez Asteroid Impact Theory:An asteroid four to nine miles in diameter hit Earth about 65 million years ago, penetrated the Earth's crust, scattered dust and debris into the atmosphere, and caused huge fires, tsunamis, severe storms with high winds and highly acidic rain, seismic activity, and perhaps even volcanic activity.
  
• Greenhouse Effect:Large amounts of methane, changing the Earths atmosphere, caused a greenhouse effect. The methane source is theorized to have come from deep-sea algae deposits and/or from by-products of plant-eating dinosaurs digestion.
  
• Over-foraging:The herbivorous dinosaurs over- foraging and the carnivorous dinosaurs over- culling of the herbivorous dinosaurs could have triggered mass starvation.

After the first groupswhich have become expert in one of the five theories of extinctionhave read about, discussed, and answered questions I provided, and each group member has completed notes that I reviewed with answers to the questions, the groups are shuffled to form new groups. Each of these secondary groups is the true cooperative group, and each group member is now an expert on one extinction theory.

Group Project:

1. Each group member explains his or her extinction theory while others take notes.
   
2. After open-ended, student-inspired discussions, each member selects the theory he or she feels best explains dinosaur extinction.
   
3. Through vote or consensus (a process they have practiced) the group selects the theory they will use for their project.
   
4. Groups can demonstrate their theory through a skit, report, PowerPoint presentation, overhead projector charts, a video production, models, or several of these options.
   
5. Each group must include mathematics using scientific notation with exponents for the very large numbers involved in dinosaur research, such as 50 million is 5.0 x 10 to the 7th power.
   
6. Groups present their findings to the class and complete self- and group analysis reports on rubrics provided.
   
7. Individual and group grades are based on teacher observations, final products and cooperative behavior.
   

Students respect each other Quiz ShowHelping Students Grow More Brain Connections:

Review, practice, and cognitive processing of learned information builds more connecting dendrites and strengthens the membranes surrounding these interneural connections resulting in faster information transport and more efficient memory retrieval.

Using a television quiz show format, students are divided into four teams. Each team works with the same information source, the class literature text from which they took notes for homework. In addition to the group task of creating quiz show questions for their opponents, there is a specific group job for each student. This question-making activity occurs several times a week, using the material from several chapters each time.

The final competition takes place on completion of the book and serves as a third review of the material before the formal individual comprehension assessments. The three reviews consist of the students first set of notes taken at home independently, the cooperative quiz-making sessions, and, finally, the quiz show itself.

The individual jobs rotate each time the group meets. They include scribe(writes down questions and answers that the group approves) and materials coordinator(makes sure all students bring their books and notes and get the clipboards with previous questions out of the bin). Other jobs are judge(when the group disagrees about whether a proposed question is satisfactory for the quiz show, the judge makes the final ruling, but must back up this opinion with reasons), cooperative overseer(takes notes on cooperative behavior to give the group feedback at the end of the session and reminds students to follow the cooperative rules already set and posted, such as not interrupting and all participate). The analystkeeps track of the groups reasons for rejecting questions. These are also reviewed at the end of the session with the expectation that the metacognition will result in improvement.

Through this cooperative activity, neuronal network reinforcement of the reviewed material is more engaging. The group processing of text material offers another modality of information input, thereby making the knowledge more accessible for students with varied learning style preferences: auditory, visual, kinesthetic (movement during the quiz show), and interpersonal.