Making Corporate Learning Equitable, Article Review Example

Bibliographic Information

Elizabeth, G. Cohen, (1998) Making Cooperative Learning Equitable: Educational leadership 56 no1 18-21 s’98.

Central Theme

Cooperative learning, a method used by teachers to ensure that all the students actively participate during small group learning is associated with two social problems namely; student social isolation and social dominance. Social isolation is associated with the group ignoring the student where as social dominance entails some students taking over the group and dictate what to be done. Social isolation and social dominance reveals status differences among students during cooperative learning.

Main Ideas

Creating equal status interaction:  Once teachers understand what brings about the social differences during group work, they can create a situational solution that will change the behavior in a short time.

Effects of status differences:  In a group, low-status members talk less than others, their ideas are taken in literary when they speak and have trouble in interacting with others on the contrary, high status students talk more than others and often their decisions are taken by the group as the answer. Those patterns of inequality among the members are not associated in any way to personality characteristic of students but are situational if the situation is changed then the behavior will change.

Causes of inequality:  In typical classrooms students rank themselves among the lines of academic, peer status, social class, race, ethnicity and gender .Also they rank themselves on skills and abilities. Those rankings often cause academic and peer status in the classroom.

Consequences:  Research reveals that in cooperative learning high status students learn more since they talk more than low status students. However, because the group is not keen to take in all the ideas and resources of all the members the group may suffer especially if the idea of the dominant member is wrong.

Making equitable groups:  Equitable groups can be created by teachers through the use of two interventions namely; multiple- abilities treatment and competence assignment to low-status students.

Multiple ability treatment enables teachers to set mixed sets of expectations for every student and assigning competence to low –status students gives the low- status student morale for competence and this finally translates into more participation in future group discussions.

Author’s Conclusion

The more frequently the teachers use the interventions of multiple –abilities and competence assignments to low- status students, the higher the participation low-status students will show. Teachers should not raise the expectations of competence of low- status students but they should make sure that they create equitable small groups.

Self Reflection

This article was very useful to me as a teacher for it revealed to me the reasons for existence of social isolation and social dominance among students during small group discussions. Further it detailed both the consequences of status differences and what the teacher should do to ensure that those differences don’t exist during discussions so that each student participates actively. As an emerging teacher I believe that I will continually apply the two interventions highlighted by the author of this article so as to make my small group learning equitable.  As teachers we have often mistaken low-status student participation with personalities of shyness, and fear e.t.c. but the author has highlighted that low student participation is not associated with personalities but it is situational. This will help me to change the situation during my classes to make sure that all students talk and participate in class equally. This article relates to domain D since I need to evaluate the extent to which learning goals were met during group learning ant it relates to B in pathwise because it connects classroom environment behaviors and student learning.