Professor Merryman

Team learning success

We no longer teach them, we facilitate a learning environment by assigning tasks and projects which hold each individual accountable for their team’s success. The amount of feedback each student wishes to receive is dependent on how active they choose to be.

Long gone are the days of dydactic, passive, boring lectures. If you speak more than 30 % of the time in your English class then you are probably not doing something right. But just how can it be done

Team learning, collaborative learning, cooperative learning, however you want to call it, requires you to form groups in the classroom that work together to reach a goal. This past semester I taught three classes of over 30 students each. I passed out a questionnaire asking them how important English was to them and whether they would like to be my assistant or a group assistant. After looking through the replies I could get an idea of who would like to be a leader and who would not. I chose two class leaders and formed the rest of the class into groups of five or six with one group leader each.

I’m not going to go into details in this blog post, but what I can say is that I will never go back to anything less than cooperative. The interaction in the group was much more than I had expected even though the classes I was experimenting with included using computers heavily. Next semester, I’ll be teaching similar classes and hope to refine my delivery from the start to include individual assessment techniques instead of team evaluation.