Cooperative Learning Lesson Plan. Psychology Essay

Cooperative Learning Lesson Plan
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Cooperative Learning Lesson Plan
Cooperative learning refers to an instructional strategy that teachers use to instill knowledge to students. In most cases, the teacher provides relevant materials to learners based on the topic of discussion and subdivide students into small groups of about three to four learners. Students are expected to work together on a specific common activity, which they are assigned by their teacher. In other words, cooperative learning enables learners to own the curriculum, and it reduces the teacher’s workload. However, the teacher must prepare adequately before the class starts to ensure that his or her expectations are met through the activities that he or she assigns to students. The five basic elements of a cooperative learning lesson plan are group processing, positive interdependence, face-to-face promotive interaction, small-group and interpersonal skills, and personal responsibility and individual accountability. The paper focuses on how the above five aspects of cooperative learning are met in a lesson plan of the first form where the teacher taught about a topic of an ecosystem with a subtopic being food chains.
Positive Interdependence
In the cooperative learning lesson plan at hand, the teacher’s primary objectives were for students to know what a food chain is and be able to identify the consumer, producer, and decomposer. In addition, students were to assemble pictures of organisms to form a specific food chain, and know the significance of food chains in the ecosystem. When it comes to positive interdependence, it means that students are divided into groups, which have specific objectives. The effort made by a group member benefits everyone in the team (“Cooperative Learning Strategy Lesson Plan,” n.d.). The primary aim of positive interdependence is to ensure that students are committed to personal and group success. In the lesson plan at hand, students were placed in groups that constituted four individuals and sat around a table with a piece of paper and a pencil. Each student in the group was required to give the name of an animal or a plant. Afterward, every group was required to discuss how the stated organisms interacted and come up with a food chain. Moreover, the teacher gave all students a picture of an animal or a plant. Learners were required to classify organisms as either consumers or producers. Consequently, placing students in groups enabled them to help one another, and they as well met group objectives.
Individual Accountability and Personal Responsibility
At this juncture, each member is accountable for achieving both individual and group goals. For instance, in the case at hand, every group member was required to give the name of an animal or a plant. Additionally, when the teacher gave each student a picture, every one of them was required to classify his or her organism as a consumer or producer (“Cooperative Learning Strategy Lesson Plan,” n.d.). For students to achieve this objective, they must have understood the different categories of organisms in a food chain and how plants and animals interact with one another. As a team, s...