• Use Jigsaw to set up specialized

• Use Jigsaw to set up specialized expertise within each team.

• Give a bonus on tests (typically 2–3 points) to all members of teams with average test grades above (say) 80%. The bonus should not be tied to each person on the team getting a certain grade, which would put too much pressure on weaker members of the team and make it impossible for teams with one very weak student to ever get the bonus. Linking the bonus to the team average grade gives all team members an incentive to get the highest grade they can and motivates the stronger students to tutor their teammates.

• If an oral report is part of the team project, a short time before the report is given the instructor arbitrarily designates which team member should report on each part of the project. Normally different team members take primary responsibility for different parts of the project and report on those parts, making it unnecessary for their teammates to understand what they did. When the proposed technique (which should be announced when the project is first assigned) is adopted, each student must make sure everyone on the team can report on what he or she did. This method provides both positive interdependence and individual accountability.

Providing individual accountability

• Give individual tests that cover all of the material on the team assignments and projects. Tests are frequently not given in traditional project-based courses such as laboratories and capstone research or design courses. Even if the tests only count for a relatively small portion of the course grade, their presence works against the familiar phenomenon of some team members doing little or none of the work and getting the same high course grades as their more responsible teammates.


8

• In lecture courses (as opposed to project-based courses), include group homework grades in the determination of the final course grade only when a student has a passing average on the individual exams. This policy—which should be announced in writing on the first day of class— is particularly important in required courses that are prerequisites for other courses in the core curriculum.

• Make someone on the team (the process monitor) responsible for ensuring that everyone understands everything in the report or assignment that the team hands in. The monitor should also make sure everyone participates in the team deliberations and that all ideas and questions are heard.

• Make teams responsible for seeing that non-contributors don’t get credit. A policy that only contributors’ names should go on assignments and reports should be announced at the beginning of the course, and reminders of the policy should be given to students complaining about hitchhikers on their teams. Most students are inclined to cut their teammates some slack initially, but if the the hitchhikers continue to miss meetings or fail to do what they were supposed to do, eventually the responsible team members get tired of being exploited and begin to implement this policy.

• Use peer ratings to make individual adjustments to team assignment grades. In a fairly simple but effective peer rating system, students rate one another on specified criteria for good team citizenship and the ratings are used to compute individual multipliers of the team grade that may range from 1.05 to 0 (28). An on-line system currently under development called CATME (Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness] computes a similar adjustment factor but also provides detailed feedback to team members on the skills and attitudes they need to work on and alerts the instructor to the existence of problematic situations (29). The ratings should be based primarily on responsible team behavior and not the percentages of the total effort contributed by each team member. Schemes of the latter sort move instruction away from the cooperative model toward individual competition, with a consequent loss in the learning benefits and skill development that cooperative learning promotes.

• Provide last resort options of firing and quitting. When a team has an uncooperative member and everything else has been tried and failed, the other team members may notify the hitchhiker in writing that he/she will be fired if cooperation is not forthcoming, sending a copy of the memo to the instructor. If there is no improvement after a week or if there is and the behavior later resumes, they may send a second memo (copy to the instructor) that he/she is no longer with the team. The fired student should meet with the instructor to discuss options. Similarly, students who are consistently doing all the work for their team may issue a warning memo that they will quit unless they start getting cooperation, and a second memo announcing their resignation from the team if the cooperation is not forthcoming. Students who get fired or quit must find a team of three willing to accept them, otherwise they get zeroes for the remaining assignments.

Help students develop teamwork skills

• Establish team policies and expectations. As part of the first assignment, have teams generate and sign a list of policies and expectations (e.g. being prepared before team sessions, calling if they have time conflicts, etc.). Have them sign the list and make copies for themselves and you. For an illustrative set of procedures, see .

• Keep groups intact for at least a month. It takes at least that long for the teams to encounter problems, and learning to work through the problems is an important part of teamwork skill development.

• Provide for periodic self-assessment of team functioning. Every 2–4 weeks, have teams respond in writing to questions such as:


9

How well are we meeting our goals and expectations?

What are we doing well?
What needs improvement?
What (if anything) will we do differently next time?

• Give students tools for managing conflict. Caution them that dealing with conflicts quickly and rationally can avoid later serious problems that are almost certain to arise if they attempt to ignore the conflicts. Introduce them to active listening:

− Students on one side of a dispute make their case without interruptions, then students on the other side have to repeat it to the initial group’s satisfaction,

− The second side then makes its case uninterrupted, and the first side has to repeat it to the second side’s satisfaction.

− The students then work out a solution. Once the students have articulated their opponents’ cases, the solution frequently comes very easily.

The instructor should facilitate active listening sessions for groups in conflict, mainly making sure the rules of the procedure are followed.

• Use crisis clinics to equip students to deal with difficult team members. Two to three weeks after group work has begun, you will start hearing complaints about certain problematic team members, such as hitchhikers or dominant students who insist on doing the problems their way and discount everyone else’s opinions. Use these characters as bases for ten-minute crisis clinics in class, in which the students brainstorm and then prioritize possible group responses to specified offending behaviors (23). At the end of this exercise, the teams leave armed with several excellent strategies for dealing with the problem, and the problem students in the class are on notice that their team members are likely to be ready for them in the future, which may induce them to change their ways.

General Suggestions

• Start small and build. If you’ve never used cooperative learning, consider starting with small group activities in class. See Felder and Brent (30) for suggestions about how to implement active learning effectively. Once you’re comfortable with that, try a team project or assignment, and gradually build up to a level of cooperative learning with which you are comfortable.

• At the start of the course, explain to students what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and what’s in it for them. Let them know what they’ll be doing in teams, what procedures you’ll follow, and what your expectations are. Then tell them why you’re doing it, perhaps noting that it will help prepare them for the type of environment most of them will experience as professionals, and sharing some of the research results (particularly those relating to higher grades). The section in this chapter on research support for cooperative learning provides useful material of this nature.

• Make team assignments more challenging than traditional individual assignments. CL works best for challenging problems and activities that require higher-level thinking skills. Students resent having to spend time in teams on assignments they could easily complete individually.

• Don’t curve course grades. It should be theoretically possible for every student in a class to earn an A. If grades are curved, team members have little incentive to help each other, while if an absolute grading system is used (e.g., a weighted average grade of 92–100 is guaranteed an A, 80–91 is guaranteed a B, etc.), there is a great incentive for cooperation.

• Conduct a midterm assessment to find out how students feel about teamwork. At about mid-semester, ask students to report anonymously on what’s working and what’s not working in their team. If many teams are having problems, spend some time in class on the relevant team skills.


10

Most of the time, however, the assessment will show that most teams are working well. (Without the assessment, the instructor usually only hears the complaints.) If this is the case, announce the results at the next class session, so the few resistors become aware that they’re in a small minority.

• Expect initial resistance from students. See Felder and Brent (31) for information on why the resistance occurs, what forms it is likely to take, and suggestions on how to deal with it.

Results (Vietnamese) 1:

• Sử dụng ghép hình để thiết lập chuyên ngành chuyên môn trong mỗi nhóm. • Cung cấp cho một tiền thưởng trên các xét nghiệm (thường 2-3 điểm) cho tất cả các thành viên của đội bóng với các lớp trung bình là thử nghiệm trên (nói) 80%. Tiền thưởng không nên được gắn với mỗi người trong đội nhận được một số lớp, trong đó có thể gây áp lực quá nhiều vào các thành viên yếu của nhóm nghiên cứu và làm cho nó không thể cho đội với một học sinh rất yếu để bao giờ nhận được tiền thưởng. Liên kết tiền thưởng để đội trung bình lớp cho tất cả thành viên trong nhóm một ưu đãi để có được cao cấp mà họ có thể và thúc đẩy các sinh viên mạnh mẽ hơn để giảng viên đồng đội của họ. • Nếu một báo cáo miệng là một phần của dự án nhóm, một thời gian ngắn trước khi báo cáo được đưa ra các hướng dẫn tự ý chỉ định mà nhóm thành viên nên báo cáo về mỗi một phần của dự án. Thành viên nhóm khác nhau thường chịu trách nhiệm chính cho các bộ phận khác nhau của dự án và báo cáo trên các bộ phận, làm cho nó không cần thiết cho đồng đội của họ để hiểu những gì họ đã làm. Khi các kỹ thuật được đề xuất (mà nên được thông báo khi các dự án đầu tiên được chỉ định) được thông qua, mỗi học sinh phải chắc chắn rằng tất cả mọi người trong nhóm có thể báo cáo về những gì họ đã làm. Phương pháp này cung cấp cả hai phụ thuộc lẫn nhau tích cực và trách nhiệm cá nhân. Cung cấp trách nhiệm cá nhân• Give individual tests that cover all of the material on the team assignments and projects. Tests are frequently not given in traditional project-based courses such as laboratories and capstone research or design courses. Even if the tests only count for a relatively small portion of the course grade, their presence works against the familiar phenomenon of some team members doing little or none of the work and getting the same high course grades as their more responsible teammates. 8 • In lecture courses (as opposed to project-based courses), include group homework grades in the determination of the final course grade only when a student has a passing average on the individual exams. This policy—which should be announced in writing on the first day of class— is particularly important in required courses that are prerequisites for other courses in the core curriculum. • Make someone on the team (the process monitor) responsible for ensuring that everyone understands everything in the report or assignment that the team hands in. The monitor should also make sure everyone participates in the team deliberations and that all ideas and questions are heard. • Make teams responsible for seeing that non-contributors don’t get credit. A policy that only contributors’ names should go on assignments and reports should be announced at the beginning of the course, and reminders of the policy should be given to students complaining about hitchhikers on their teams. Most students are inclined to cut their teammates some slack initially, but if the the hitchhikers continue to miss meetings or fail to do what they were supposed to do, eventually the responsible team members get tired of being exploited and begin to implement this policy. • Use peer ratings to make individual adjustments to team assignment grades. In a fairly simple but effective peer rating system, students rate one another on specified criteria for good team citizenship and the ratings are used to compute individual multipliers of the team grade that may range from 1.05 to 0 (28). An on-line system currently under development called CATME (Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness] computes a similar adjustment factor but also provides detailed feedback to team members on the skills and attitudes they need to work on and alerts the instructor to the existence of problematic situations (29). The ratings should be based primarily on responsible team behavior and not the percentages of the total effort contributed by each team member. Schemes of the latter sort move instruction away from the cooperative model toward individual competition, with a consequent loss in the learning benefits and skill development that cooperative learning promotes. • Provide last resort options of firing and quitting. When a team has an uncooperative member and everything else has been tried and failed, the other team members may notify the hitchhiker in writing that he/she will be fired if cooperation is not forthcoming, sending a copy of the memo to the instructor. If there is no improvement after a week or if there is and the behavior later resumes, they may send a second memo (copy to the instructor) that he/she is no longer with the team. The fired student should meet with the instructor to discuss options. Similarly, students who are consistently doing all the work for their team may issue a warning memo that they will quit unless they start getting cooperation, and a second memo announcing their resignation from the team if the cooperation is not forthcoming. Students who get fired or quit must find a team of three willing to accept them, otherwise they get zeroes for the remaining assignments. Help students develop teamwork skills• Establish team policies and expectations. As part of the first assignment, have teams generate and sign a list of policies and expectations (e.g. being prepared before team sessions, calling if they have time conflicts, etc.). Have them sign the list and make copies for themselves and you. For an illustrative set of procedures, see . • Keep groups intact for at least a month. It takes at least that long for the teams to encounter problems, and learning to work through the problems is an important part of teamwork skill development. • Provide for periodic self-assessment of team functioning. Every 2–4 weeks, have teams respond in writing to questions such as: 9 How well are we meeting our goals and expectations?What are we doing well?What needs improvement?What (if anything) will we do differently next time?• Give students tools for managing conflict. Caution them that dealing with conflicts quickly and rationally can avoid later serious problems that are almost certain to arise if they attempt to ignore the conflicts. Introduce them to active listening: − Students on one side of a dispute make their case without interruptions, then students on the other side have to repeat it to the initial group’s satisfaction, − The second side then makes its case uninterrupted, and the first side has to repeat it to the second side’s satisfaction. − The students then work out a solution. Once the students have articulated their opponents’ cases, the solution frequently comes very easily. The instructor should facilitate active listening sessions for groups in conflict, mainly making sure the rules of the procedure are followed.• Use crisis clinics to equip students to deal with difficult team members. Two to three weeks after group work has begun, you will start hearing complaints about certain problematic team members, such as hitchhikers or dominant students who insist on doing the problems their way and discount everyone else’s opinions. Use these characters as bases for ten-minute crisis clinics in class, in which the students brainstorm and then prioritize possible group responses to specified offending behaviors (23). At the end of this exercise, the teams leave armed with several excellent strategies for dealing with the problem, and the problem students in the class are on notice that their team members are likely to be ready for them in the future, which may induce them to change their ways. General Suggestions• Start small and build. If you’ve never used cooperative learning, consider starting with small group activities in class. See Felder and Brent (30) for suggestions about how to implement active learning effectively. Once you’re comfortable with that, try a team project or assignment, and gradually build up to a level of cooperative learning with which you are comfortable. • At the start of the course, explain to students what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and what’s in it for them. Let them know what they’ll be doing in teams, what procedures you’ll follow, and what your expectations are. Then tell them why you’re doing it, perhaps noting that it will help prepare them for the type of environment most of them will experience as professionals, and sharing some of the research results (particularly those relating to higher grades). The section in this chapter on research support for cooperative learning provides useful material of this nature. • Make team assignments more challenging than traditional individual assignments. CL works best for challenging problems and activities that require higher-level thinking skills. Students resent having to spend time in teams on assignments they could easily complete individually. • Don’t curve course grades. It should be theoretically possible for every student in a class to earn an A. If grades are curved, team members have little incentive to help each other, while if an absolute grading system is used (e.g., a weighted average grade of 92–100 is guaranteed an A, 80–91 is guaranteed a B, etc.), there is a great incentive for cooperation. • Conduct a midterm assessment to find out how students feel about teamwork. At about mid-semester, ask students to report anonymously on what’s working and what’s not working in their team. If many teams are having problems, spend some time in class on the relevant team skills. 10 Most of the time, however, the assessment will show that most teams are working well. (Without the assessment, the instructor usually only hears the complaints.) If this is the case, announce the results at the next class session, so the few resistors become aware that they’re in a small minority.• Expect initial resistance from students. See Felder and Brent (31) for information on why the resistance occurs, what forms it is likely to take, and suggestions on how to deal with it.