Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach

JOIN THE CONVERSATION—CORNY TEACHER JOKES

Educational researchers have actually studied the use of humor in the classroom. Accord-

ing to an article in the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development’sEduca-

tion Update 43(5), “Make Me Laugh: Using Humor in the Classroom,” a 1991 study found

that teachers use humor to put students at ease, get their attention, demonstrate their hu-

manity, and reduce the psychological distance between teachers and students.

Questions to Consider:

1. When you were a student, how did you and your friends react to teachers who thought
   they were funny? Why?
   2.Do you think humor is an important part of a teacher’s repertoire? Explain.

Student Achievement? E: How Does Cooperative Learning Build Community While Promoting

COMMUNITY WHILE PROMOTING STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT?

Cooperative learning is not completely new. Students taught and learned from each other in
colonial and frontier America; fans of author Laura Ingalls Wilder know that cooperative
learning was used in her one-room prairie school house. As a result of the ideas of educators
such as John Dewey and Francis Parker, cooperative learning was popular in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, and many teachers continue to use elements of cooperative learn-
ing in group work, projects, and reports.
As with any other educational “innovation,” advocates of cooperative learning frequently
disagree with each other about the best approaches and the most important goals. However,
some common points do emerge in the educational literature and in teacher discussions:

1. Cooperative learning enhances student interest because it gives them a greater stake in
   what is happening in their class and in their education. In large classes, it provides stu-
   dents with more individual attention because they are involved in helping each other.
   Students at all academic levels, including students in need of remediation and academi-
   cally advanced students, seem to learn more and to learn more effectively, in coopera-
   tive learning teams.


2. Cooperative learning enhances the social skills and values that are important for future
   academic and economic success, and that are essential for participation in multicul-
   tural, democratic communities.


3. Teachers must be able to define their own classroom goals and experiment with the ap-
   proach or approaches that are successful in involving their students in learning.

I used cooperative learning teams in large high school classes with more than 30 stu-
dents, and I consistently found four major benefits. First, there is significant improvement
in the willingness of students to write and the quality of their writing. Working in coopera-
tive learning teams, students are able to stimulate and support each other and to edit each
other’s work. Second, participation in discussions in their cooperative learning teams gave
students an opportunity to test their ideas before presenting them to the full class and in
front of me. It enabled students who generally did not participate in class discussions to
participate more freely, either presenting their own ideas or representing their teams. As a
result, class discussions were enriched by the addition of diverse viewpoints. Third, class

COMMUNITY 161