Team Cooperation Goals:
The Office of Professional Learning Strategy Series will supply teachers with the tools, templates, texts and teacher tips to bring research-proven instructional strategies into their practice. The first series will focus on Cooperative Learning.
The ability to collaborate and cooperate in a learning environment is a necessary skill for the 21st century, and improves learning outcomes for students (Prince, 2004). Students must learn to speak, listen, and work together in order to become successful students in higher education, and the job force. Cooperative learning strategies include student discourse techniques, strategies for management, behavior routines for pairs and groups, celebrations, assessment and data collection for individual accountability, and meta-cognitive strategies.
In order to bring these highly effective strategies into instructional practice, teachers must explicitly teach the behaviors associated with cooperative learning in a structured and purposeful way. With the end-in-mind, of a highly engaged, discourse filled classroom, we began this series with a structure for teaching partner and team routines- A Looks Like/Sounds Like Chart. To view Step 1 of the Strategy Series, click here. We then added to the series with a post on a simple student discourse routine, a Think/Pair/Share. To view Step 2 of the Strategy Series, click here.
Cooperative Learning- Step 3
Tool: Team Cooperation Goals- Team Cooperation Goals are a set of cooperative behavior standards teachers explicitly teach, practice, and reinforce in their classrooms for effective cooperative learning or team work. The standards, originally established by researchers Dr. Nancy Madden and Dr. Robert Salvin typically consist of five behaviors- Practice Active Listening, Help & Encourage Each Other, Everyone Participates, Explain Your Ideas & Tell Why, and Complete Tasks. Team Cooperation Goals are an essential component of cooperative learning. Although often thought of as tools for the elementary classroom, Team Cooperation Goals are essential for establishing, and using cooperative learning in the secondary classroom as well.
Establishing Team Cooperation Goals in the Classroom: To establish team cooperation goals, teachers should introduce, model, and practice one cooperation goal at a time; introducing, and focusing on a new standard once a week until all of the goals have been explicitly taught. Once team cooperation goals are established in the classroom, teachers should post the standards in the classroom on an anchor chart. Teachers may want to use a Looks Like/Sounds Like Chart to post the goals. Once posted in the classroom, teachers should review the goals with their class and refer students to the anchor charts for guidance. Before teaching a lesson with a cooperative learning component (partnerships, and/or small or large groups), teachers should pick one or two team cooperation goals to focus on, review what the behavior for that goal looks and sounds like, and then reward team cooperation points when the targeted behavior is demonstrated during the lesson.
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- Practice Active Listening
- Looks Like: Eyes on speaker, body turned towards speaker, body language conveying understanding (head nodding, smile).
- Sounds Like: One speaker at a time, encouraging words, adding on when speaker is finished, summarizing speaker’s statements.
- Help & Encourage Others
- Looks Like: Eye contact to speaker, team or partners all participating, smiling at team members/partners, all team members have necessary supplies, sharing.
- Sounds Like: Encouraging words towards team members such as: “You can do it” and “Have you tried doing it this way?” and “Would you like me to help you?” and “Do you need more support from your team?”
- Everyone Participates
- Looks Like: All team members have an active role in the group, all team members doing equal amounts of work, smiling, busy team members.
- Sounds Like: On topic conversations, encouraging words towards team members, team members using kind words to ensure all team members are participating.
- Explain Your Ideas & Tell Why
- Looks Like: Eyes on Speaker, one speaker at a time, body language conveying active listening.
- Sounds Like: Using the question stem to answer (if the question is, “What color is the house?” the answer is, “The color of the house is brown.”), using evidence to support answer (“The color of the house is brown. I know this because on page 98, the author states, ‘The house’s brown color reminded him of the wet mud near the lake.’), summarizing other team members answers (“So what you said was…”), adding on to others’ answers (“I’d like to add that the roof of the house is red, because on page 99 the author states…”), and polite disagreeing (“Although I understand why you believe the roof is red, I disagree. According to the author on page 102, …”).
- Complete Tasks
- Looks Like: Busy team members with little or no down time, all assigned work turned in on time, all work thoroughly and neatly completed.
- Sounds Like: Team member(s) keeping track of time, team members reminding team of due dates/time remaining, check-ins on completion rate by team members.
Tools, Texts & Templates
- Team Cooperation Goals
- Template: Team Score Sheet
- Text: A Review of the Research
- A Model Lesson for Team Building
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