• DOI:10.5860/choice.36-4623
• Corpus ID: 152546945

Professional Development for Cooperative Learning. Issues and Approaches.

@inproceedings{Brody1998ProfessionalDF,
  title={Professional Development for Cooperative Learning. Issues and Approaches.},
  author={Celeste M. Brody and Neil Davidson},
  year={1998}
}

• C. Brody, Neil Davidson
• Published 1998
• Education

This book is about training K-12 teachers to adopt a cooperative learning paradigm in their classrooms. It provides a collection of solicited essays aimed at instructing future trainers of public school teachers in America. The book consists of 15 chapters by leaders in the field. In addition there is an introduction and an afterward by the editors. The contributions summarize the principles of major efforts in teacher professional development over the past decades. In addition to distinguishing among the various approaches within the rather incestuous family of practitioners represented, the book relates lessons from the frontlines and addresses the issue of systemic change. Here is a selection of advice offered the reader (emphasis added): "Teachers need support to continue evolving their conceptions of cooperative learning" (p. 45). "Simply providing information and [in-service workshops] result in only a small minority of teachers actually implementing the ideas" (p. 60). "Teachers must 'live' cooperative groupwork in formal training programs" (p. 69). "When teachers learn how to use a variety of cooperative learning structures they are empowered to reach various educational objectives" (p. 105). "The Child Development Project's model of cooperative learning builds on. .. teaching prosocial values and building a caring schoolwide and classroom community" (p. 148). Socially-Conscious Cooperative Learning "teaches about cooperation as an idea and value and links cooperative learning in the classroom to the broader goal of building a more cooperative and just society" (p. 203). "What happens between and after training sessions is more important than what happens during training sessions [and] teachers' behavior is largely determined by the organizational structure of the school" (p. 232). As these excerpts suggest, the lesson learned in struggling to train teachers in non-traditional teaching methods is self-reflexive: the training must itself be non-traditional training. The old in-service presentations must be replaced with processes that involve the