Excerpted from Chapter 9, by Mary Male, Ph.D., of Cooperative Learning and Strategies for Inclusion: Celebrating Diversity in the Classroom, Second Edition, edited by JoAnne W. Putnam, Ph.D.

Copyright © 1998 by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Imagine that you are planning your first cooperatively structured computer lesson. Once you have selected the objectives and learning outcomes for the lesson, you will want to select a cooperative learning strategy that has the best fit with the objectives of the lesson. Start with an activity with which you’re familiar — a successful lesson that you have fine-tuned on numerous occasions. For this particular lesson, you have selected “Learning Together,” a cooperative learning strategy that illustrates the use of the essential components of cooperative learning (Johnson et al., 1993). Two sample lessons incorporating the Learning Together strategy are included in Figure 1 and Figure 2.

The next step is to select the software that matches the outcomes of the lesson (see Step 1 in the sample lesson in Figure 1). For example, you might select a word processor with built-in graphics for students to write and illustrate a story, using a read-aloud book as a model (Broad, 1991). As we plan this lesson by using computers, you could follow the same lesson-planning format introduced in Chapter 3, but you would also want to be sure that

• For Step 1, at least one student in each group can operate the selected software program. You can assign students to groups based on computer experience or skill; you also can use the activity as an opportunity to perform a status treatment (Cohen, 1997) with a low-status student (i.e., a low-achieving student, a student included in the classroom from special education, a second-language learner, or a student whose behavior interferes with positive peer relationships). In a status treatment, you use a high-status skill (e.g., computer expertise) and assign competence to the low-status student by ensuring that the student has a special ability that can be pointed out to the group (e.g., “Stephen has had a chance to really learn how to use this program skillfully; you will want to be sure to get his help as you are learning to use the software”). If necessary, you can pretrain the student in the computer skill in order to make sure that the recognition is authentic.
  
  
• Step 2 includes all of the decisions you must make about assigning students to teams, the size of the teams, the materials needed, and the roles you will use with the groups (Anderson, 1995).
  
  
• In Step 3, you plan how you will introduce the lesson. You’ve chosen Quick as a Cricket (Wood, 1989) to read aloud to the students, and you’ve stimulated their curiosity about the book by having them brainstorm their group’s names of animals and describing words (i.e., adjectives), which they can then use when they write their own team version of Quick as a Cricket at the computer. You set the stage for the cooperative aspect of the lesson by telling the students that their book will consist of three sentences about each team member (positive interdependence and individual accountability) and that you want the students to rotate the roles of keyboarder, praiser, and checker. (If these roles are new to the students, you will want to take the time to systematically teach them, as described previously.) Your criteria for success are a completed book and reading the book aloud to the class. You will call on one person at random from each team to do the reading, so all students will need to make sure that the whole team can read all of the words.
  
  
• For Step 4, you plan how you will observe the group working both at the computer and at a table as the members plan their book, share their sentences, and complete their assignment at the computer. Design an easy-to-use observation sheet so that you can give precise feedback on teamwork during the processing portion of the lesson.
  
  
• Step 5 in the lesson planning format provides you with a place to reflect on the outcomes of your lesson once you have tried the cooperative learning strategy with your students.

To download Figure 1, click here.

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