Interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence are more useful than IQ for succeeding in business and life.
Malcolm Gladwell, The Outliers
Interdependence InvolvesTeaching students how to cooperate
- students understand the need for collaborative skills
- students understand what a social skill entails
- students first practice the skill in isolation from subject content
- students practice the collaborative skill while learning subject content
- students reflect on their collaborative skill building
Reading Curriculum Supporting Social–Emotional Learning
Read to Lead, grades 5–9. a free award-winning supplemental reading program from Classroom, Inc., is designed to increase literacy, leadership, and 21st-century skills. This research-based program embeds social–emotional learning throughout its modules by developing students’ decision-making, empathy, and goal-setting abilities, all while increasing their reading skills.
The Best Resources Showing Social Emotional Learning Isn’t Enough for those past articles.
An interview with sociologist and author Matthew Desmond, headlined The War on Poverty Is Over. Rich People Won.
Teacher Learnings
- learn specific strategies to implement cooperative learning procedures progressing from low risk to high risk.
- restructure existing lessons and curriculum units so that cooperative learning is used more often
- assess the effectiveness of cooperative learning
- Behaviors that guarantee you will lose a child vs. behaviors that will lessen the chance
Fostering Emotional Literacy Begins With the Brain
Teaching elementary students the neuroscience of emotions helps them understand their feelings and empowers them to respond with intentionality.
Group activities can stimulate thinking, cooperation, and bonds among children that will carry over into the academic curriculum.
The First Six Weeks of School
Basic Components of Cooperative Learning
There is a difference between simply putting students into groups to learn and in structuring cooperative interdependence among students. Cooperation is not having students sit side-by-side at the same table to talk with each other as they do their individual assignments. Cooperation is not assigning a report to a group of students where a few students do all the work.Cooperative learning requires that students use interpersonal and small group social skills. Placing socially unskilled students in a learning group and telling them to cooperate obviously will not be successful. Students must be taught the social skills needed for collaboration and be motivated to use them.
Finally, students must also be given the time and structures for processing (i.e.. analyzing) how well their learning groups are functioning and the extent to which students are employing their social skills to help all group members achieve and to maintain effective working relationships within the group. (Collaboration in the Classroom)
- Positive Interdependence involves goal interdependence, task interdependence, resource interdependence, role interdependence.
- Cooperative learning requires face-to-face interaction among students.
- Individual accountability
- Gaining expertise is a long term process requiring years of implementation. It involves starting at a practical low risk level and gradually progressing to higher risk activities. Often efforts will fail to match the ideal of what you wish to accomplish for a considerable length of time. Failure is part of the process and reflection and tweaking are essential to the implementation curve. (see chart page 1:15 Johnson)
- Students putting their heads together over assignments
- Talking about assignments
- Drilling each other on factual information
- Sharing answers and materials
- Encouraging each other
Topics to consider if not suggested by teachers:
- Improved social and emotional skills foster academic achievement
- more active engagement in learning
- Increased motivation to learn
- Increased student responsibility for their own and group's learning
- Improved interethnic relations and acceptance of academically challenged students
- Improved time on task
- Improved collaborative skills
- Increased positive attitude towards school
- Increased ability to appreciate and consider a variety of perspectives
- Greater opportunities for the teacher to observe and assess student learning.