by Alfie Kohn
I am arguing that cooperation must come to be seen as a fundamental orientation toward other people rather than a set of techniques that are hauled out for specific lessons. This means working to change the feel of the classroom itself. As one second-grade teacher (affiliated with the Child Development Project) put it:
You can’t just teach Cooperative Learning as a separate subject that you just do for thirty minutes a day and then just treat the children differently the rest of the time. The whole atmosphere of the classroom from the time the kids get to school until the time they go home is based on the idea that you expect them to get along, help each other, be cooperative, [follow] all the same guidelines in everything they do.76
Notice that this does not mean instituting a circumscribed program of CL and passively waiting for its benefits to seep out and improve the dynamics of other interactions and activities. It means teachers must broaden their vision, rethinking the entire learning experience and working with students to fashion that experience into something that is cooperative inside and out.
Too much of American education consists of teachers spewing out facts and requiring students to spew them back; if the latter is done correctly, the transaction is pronounced successful. This goes on in elementary school (“Europe is a what, boys and girls? That’s right, a continent. Very good.”), and it goes on in college as instructors reward polysyllabic conformity by playing a game that might be called Guess What’s on My Legal Pad.* The research and values that support the use of CL can be understood as an invitation to change all this, not to abandon the teaching of basic skills but to distinguish necessary skills from trivia and to embed those skills in the more substantive process of meaningful thinking.
There is good reason to think that CL can be enormously successful without falling back on what are, in effect, bribes for cooperating—so long as students are provided with a measure of control over their learning, a meaningful curriculum, and the opportunity to create a palpable sense of community in the classroom.
Research from at least three CL programs has shown that extrinsic motivators simply are not necessary to produce academic achievement. First, as I noted earlier, the Group Investigation approach has achieved consistent advantages in terms of the quality of learning. Second, the Child Development Project found that children in its program classrooms did significantly better than a carefully matched group of comparison students on an essay exam measuring higherorder reading comprehension, while suffering no disadvantage on standardized tests.78
The third and most recent example comes from a second-grade mathematics program based on constructivist principles and smallgroup work and characterized by “a complete absence of extrinsic motivation or external reward systems, including praise.” In place of textbook assignments, students were encouraged to take an active role in figuring out and discussing problems that occurred in concrete situations. Compared to their peers who had been in traditional classrooms, these children developed more sophisticated higher-level reasoning skills without falling behind on basic computational tasks.79
To the extent that attention is paid to the issues of control, curriculum, and community, CL can flourish and, further, can be part of a radical transformation of American schooling. To the extent that these things are absent, education itself, not only CL, is in trouble.
THE PROSPECTS FOR COOPERATION
To what extent has CL made an impact on how our children are actually taught? The answer one gives will depend on when one takes a reading (the assessment that follows, written in 1992, may soon become dated) and where one happens to live (CL’s popularity in California may lead residents to assume that children everywhere are now cooperating). It also may reflect one’s feelings about the desirability of CL: partisans, carried away by their enthusiasm, sometimes exaggerate the influence of the movement, while opponents, seeking to alarm the populace, may do the same thing.80
By now, many—perhaps most—U.S. teachers have at least heard the phrase “cooperative learning.” Tens of thousands have been formally trained in one version or another. CL has its own magazine, which is intended for researchers as well as classroom teachers.* Articles on the subject show up with some regularity in other education journals and magazines, and several bibliographies have been compiled, listing some of the hundreds of books and articles published to date.81 In March 1992, the newsletter of a major American education organization declared that “unlike some other innovations in education, cooperative learning has not been a flash in the pan. After years of attention, it remains a hot topic among educators.”82
Various mainstream organizations have come to recognize CL’s potential for enhancing the quality of learning.* The American Association for the Advancement of Science released a report in 1989 declaring that “the collaborative nature of scientific and technological work should be strongly reinforced by frequent group activity in the classroom.”83 That same year, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics also affirmed the value of small-group work.84 (Some universities are beginning to use a collaborative approach for teaching higher-level mathematics.)85 The National Council of Teachers of English has published an anthology on the subject and urged that secondary teachers offer “multiple opportunities for students to work together.”86 In Britain, meanwhile, “Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI) have been actively promoting group work in schools in the belief that it increases children’s motivation, develops responsibility and initiative, and creates a context for effective learning.”87
The growing popularity of CL, however, is cause for concern among those who recognize its potential to reshape the educational landscape. Any development that is sufficiently well known and well regarded may begin to take on the contours of a fad, which, in turn, means that it will be treated as a fad rather than with the necessary seriousness. In practical terms, this means that principals and superintendents, trying to keep up with pedagogical fashion, may hire consultants who offer to provide brief (and therefore seductively inexpensive) training sessions for their faculties: “Give me your teachers for two days of in-service and I’ll show them how to do cooperative learning.” Some trainers even claim to be able to give teachers sufficient skills to become trainers themselves.
One of the central theses of this chapter is that CL at its best requires a significant reconceptualization of what learning involves and how the people who spend the day together in a classroom relate to one another. Any attempt to implement CL will therefore raise a host of problems and questions, and many of them will not even occur to teachers until they have had the chance to work with the new arrangement for a time. The fact is that the process of making this kind of change must be done over a period of years, with frequent observation and coaching as well as continuous, structured peer support.89* (Moreover, it must be done in a way that is respectful of teachers’ experiences and concerns. Even good ideas should not, and ultimately cannot, be forced down unwilling throats. In fact, we might even go so far as to say that policymakers, trainers, and administrators cannot change what goes on in classrooms. All they can do is invite teachers to change what goes on in classrooms.)
One writer has estimated that only 5 to 10 percent of participants in a CL workshop will continue to use the cooperative approach over time if ongoing coaching and support are absent.91 If teachers receive quick-and-dirty training sessions, if the trainer is long gone by the time difficulties start to present themselves, many educators will discard CL as “unworkable” or “unrealistic” and settle back to wait for next year’s fad. To this extent, there is cause for worry among those who discern its long-term potential about CL’s short-term popularity.
On the other hand, the extent of that popularity should not be overstated. If it is not quite accurate to call it a drop in the bucket of national educational practice, cooperative learning is still not much more than a puddle. Walk into a random American classroom and you will still probably find those contests for attention and grades, that structurally
enforced cruelty described more than three decades ago by Jules Henry (see [>]), and rows of children at separate desks, each one facing the back of someone else’s head. Flip through the pages of debate about education reform and you will see scant attention to the question of how one student’s learning is related to another’s.
Clearly, we have a very long way to go. The distance seems even greater, though, in light of the fact that some teachers who have been introduced to CL react much as a body does to the implantation of foreign tissue. The extent of this rejection is difficult to gauge, but one observer wrote that “despite the academic vogue of cooperative learning and efforts at dissemination made by its proponents, it remains an instructional strategy seldom used in a systematic manner over the course of a school year or more.”92 It is difficult to verify this pessimistic assessment, but no one seeking to promote the use of CL should minimize the challenge involved in doing so successfully.
The reasons for that challenge are multiple.93 They include inadequate training in, and support for, the practice of CL and widespread misunderstanding about what CL does and does not involve. But some obstacles to the effective adoption of cooperation run deeper and would likely cause problems even if the training were perfection itself.
Specifically, we can identify four primary aspects of CL that may be unsettling to many educators. The first is that it challenges our cultural commitment to the value of competition; the second is that it challenges our cultural commitment to the value of individualism. I have already had my say on both of these issues.
The third attitudinal barrier is that CL demands attention to social goals. Teachers can scarcely avoid noticing that children sometimes seem indifferent to suffering, unable to resolve conflicts fairly, and likely either to try to get their needs met by coercing others or, conversely, to be victimized by coercion. But even those who recognize that the time spent together in the classroom could, be used to attend to these problems may believe that this focus would be inappropriate because their charge is limited to providing instruction in the traditional academic subjects.
Whatever the reason, Goodlad’s study—probably the most comprehensive survey of American schools ever made—found that with respect to goals such as “developing productive and satisfying relations with others based on respect, trust, cooperation, and caring,” what goes on in the classroom at best contributes nothing and often actually impedes the promotion of such values.94
Even when attention is given to the development of children’s social skills and prosocial orientation, this enterprise is “frequently viewed through an instrumental prism of how [these skills] affect academic achievement rather than as schooling goals with inherent legitimacy,” according to educational researcher Yisrael Rich.95 The models of CL that call for explicit instruction in social skills, especially those that recommend taking time to create a caring classroom community, would presumably be resisted by teachers who are concerned to help children become good learners but not necessarily good people. As Rich observes,
If cooperative learning is perceived by teachers as primarily promoting pupils’ personal or social goals, we would not expect very many teachers to voluntarily participate. And if they are required to participate in the workshop, few of them will arrive at the decision to adopt the new method, assuming they are allowed some choice in the matter, no matter how well the workshop is conducted. And if they are required to adopt the new method, even fewer will implement it with a reasonable degree of fidelity.96
The final factor that may serve as an obstacle to the widespread use of CL is that having children work in groups (at least in a way consistent with the constructivist approach to learning) reduces a teacher’s control over the classroom and the predictability of what happens each day. Someone—it might have been me—once said that the traditional model of teaching amounts to a rehearsed solo performance by the instructor (with students relegated to the role of audience), whereas CL not only offers instruments to everyone in the room but invites a jazz improvisation. The analogy has its limits, but it captures two features of CL: its demand that the teacher guide students in helping each other to learn (rather than being the only source of ideas and information in the room)97 and its introduction of uncertainty in place of a predictable progression through a prepared lesson plan. Some teachers have not bargained for either of these changes.
There is a certain pleasure to be taken from the role of king or queen, even if one’s subjects are very short. To the extent that the process of schooling has been predicated on compelling students to follow directions, to absorb information and regurgitate it on command, to work silently on whatever task is presented, the profession may have attracted some people who thrive on autocracy. I regularly meet teachers who shine with generosity of spirit and an instinct for what children need to grow. But others, let us frankly admit, are disinclined to embrace an approach that gives students an active role in their own learning and has them look to each other for help. With CL the teacher has allies throughout the room—a scenario exciting and refreshing to some educators but highly disconcerting to those who, like trial attorneys during cross examination, never ask a question to which they do not already know the answer.98
One way around this barrier, of course, is simply to dilute CL until it is not so different from the present arrangement. When the nature of the interchange among group members is highly circumscribed—more than the students’ age or the subject matter would seem to require—we might suspect that the teacher has compromised the process of cooperation more to maintain control than to maximize the heuristic value of the experience. Some trainers are water carriers, so to speak, for this dilution.
Interestingly, the versions of CL that seek to dictate to students each component of cooperation—thereby reducing their sense of autonomy as fellow meaning-creators and idea-explorers—are likely to be so structured and systematized that teachers, too, are deprived of authority. So-called teacher-proof curricula, we ought to have realized by now, are not only disrespectful but chimerical: they are the perpetual-motion machines of education. Cookbook approaches to CL similarly attempt to specify in advance what cannot be specified in advance, to reduce learning to a series of discrete steps that renders the process sterile and excludes both teachers and students from the real work (and joy) of what happens in the classroom.
CL is not simply the status quo except in groups. At its best, it is an entirely different way of approaching the act of learning. Sharan warns that if we reduce the potentially liberating principles of CL to
a set of prepackaged procedures for managing the movements of warm bodies in the classroom . . . to get them to study, with just a little less boredom, the same material that would bore them more if it were studied in some other way . . . [then CL] will soon be discarded as another fraud, as will so many other packaged methods now loudly touted in the educational marketplace.99
In fact, the lack of predictability that CL can engender is not a necessary evil; it is a requirement for learning. Neither CL nor education in general should allow itself to get too comfortable. A century and a half ago, Kierkegaard, observing that most public figures pride themselves on figuring out how to make people’s lives easier in one way or the other, set for himself “out of love for mankind” the task of “creat[ing] difficulties everywhere.”100 In a sense, and with compassion, this is the teacher’s task: to “design instructional activities that are likely to be problematic for children”101 and to guard against relaxing when things are going too smoothly. “Deeper learning would look somewhat ‘messier’ than what I am seeing in most of our [cooperative] classrooms” is how Eric Schaps, the director of the Child Development Project, once put it.102
The prospects for CL to sweep the country, and for the country to stay swept, depend to some extent on the willingness of parents to demand that their children—that all children—be permitted the benefits of working together. Many parents, looking back on their own years in school, may recall
a superlative teacher here, a few satisfying friendships there, an occasional moment of excitement when a connection was made or an idea understood. But the background to these pleasant memories may be something much like what Goodlad and Henry and scores of other observers have documented: isolation, humiliation, self-doubt, rivalry, pointless tasks, boredom. All of us for whom this account rings true have a choice to make. We can set our jaws and harden our hearts, muttering, “Hey, if it was good enough for me . . .”—thereby dooming another generation to the same fate. Or we can ask, “What can be done to make sure our children get better than we got?” Even to ask this question presupposes that we have recognized—and this may come as an epiphany—that, just as a game does not have to be a contest, so the stultifying aspects of our education are not inevitable features of going to school.
Is cooperative learning out of step with our society’s values? Some proponents deny this heatedly, pointing out that even a culture or an economic system as steeped in competition as our own requires cooperation to be successful. To some extent this is true, but we might as well admit that CL does challenge the beliefs and practices that set people against one another. Some curriculum guides augment this challenge by making cooperation and competition explicit topics for study,103 but the very fact of learning by working together presents children with another model, a different experience, a sense of perspective on the competition they otherwise might have taken for granted. Cooperative learning should not stand or fall depending on how well it serves our society’s institutions. Rather, our institutions should stand or fall depending on how well they serve the sort of values represented by cooperative learning.