Suggestions on Using Lessons

PAGE CONTENTS

COOPERATIVE LEARNING IS NOT GROUP WORK

Strunk & White’s “Elements of Style” tells us to prefer positive language rather than negative. In other words, tell the reader what IS rather than what is NOT. However, if you are new to cooperative learning, you have to understand you must unlearn some habits in this radically different method.

Group work is simply a number of students bunched up in a mass and thrown at an assignment and told “figure it out.” Sit back, relax and enjoy a few days of getting caught up while they do this group work. This is almost the opposite of cooperative learning. Students hide in the group and don’t do their part. Those students don’t learn. Those students aren’t teaching. Those students are often the ones teachers need to learn the most because they are already struggling.

Cooperative learning, on the other hand, is structured and requires five basic ideas:

  • All group members depend on all other group members. Positive interdependence means the team cannot succeed without each group members working to benefit everyone and supporting each other in the process. Everyone has a role to play that they must or the group gets stuck.
  • Everyone is accountable. Assessments are for both the group and individuals.
  • Students encourage one another. Promotive interaction is required for students to coach and encourage their teammates through the process.
  • Appropriate social skills are taught. Just like content knowledge, social skills are learned behavior. Students must learn and demonstrate these skills to work cooperatively and not competitively.
  • Groups must reflect. They should consider the processes they used and how to improve going forward.

This means all students have to learn or let down their team. The team, which is supportive, provides intrinsic motivation students need to complete their part. There is no hiding. However, the supportive environment will help students understand that not knowing is OK and a part of being a well-informed person is to know thy weaknesses and seek help when you don’t.

ORDER OF LESSONS & UNITS

Do what makes sense to you. These 40 lessons are presented in the order that makes sense to me. That would be ONE person with what is likely a wildly different campus and group of students and program than what you have. Teach the units in any order you want. Teach just one unit. Each unit is designed to be taught in isolation.

Lessons need adjustment to teach out of order. The lessons within each unit are designed to be sequential. However, you are free to use the process and substitute the worksheets and assignments. The lessons, therefore, can be taught in any order that makes sense to you with some adjustment. You cannot teach them as-is in any order you want without those adjustments, though. Students without background knowledge would be confused as they are scaffolded to help students go from knowing nothing to building up.

Don’t remove the cooperative nature of the lessons. The key idea behind these lessons is not a profound set of new content and approaches to journalism. The new idea is how journalism is taught to better match the journalism process. Take the method and apply your previously made notes, slideshows or projects. Use other cooperative learning strategies, but don’t remove the cooperative nature of the lessons and expect them to function appropriately. Be unsurprised if the lesson doesn’t work after you removed the method.

For example, the interviewing unit requires a project where they interview someone that will eventually be used in a publication. This can be altered to fit a project that makes sense to your program. However, the project is just any other old assignment you can find online without that cooperative learning element.

SWITCHING TO COOPERATIVE LEARNING TAKES ADJUSTMENT

“What if…?” You can play the “what-if” game all day and it isn’t any different than other methods of teaching. “What if students refuse to participate?” Those students already are. The dependence will provide more motivation coming from their peers. “What if students don’t like it?” Most people don’t like the taste of medicine but trust their doctor to cure them. Your students may not always appreciate the method (at first) but they will learn.

Yes, cooperative learning feels foreign at first. Students aren’t used to being the expert and teaching their peers. You can find reasons to “What if…” any learning method to death. Your class WILL struggle with some part of this. YOU will struggle with part of this. However, the adjustment period fades quickly and students treat the process like any other standard of behavior in class.

“Doesn’t it take a lot of time? Isn’t there a lot of prep work?” Only if you make it. There will definitely be a shift in the materials you are used to using. These lessons are, in part, an attempt to ease the transition. However, there are many forms of cooperative learning. These lessons are highly structured for the entire class period. They are pure cooperative learning.

Other strategies require less in-class time and preparation. You could, for example, spend 10 minutes having an advanced class read a newspaper article and have the group perform a round-robin exercise with each member taking charge of analyzing something different about it: One describes the newsworthiness; another critiques the style and grammar; a third discusses the structure; the final member focuses on how your publication can write a similar story. Boom. In and out in 10 minutes (or less). This is more informal, but still solves some problems in traditional learning with a quick cooperative method.

The kids actually enjoyed it and didn’t realize just how they don’t use the AP Stylebook correctly. Oh, they were taught, but having it broken down into group format and each person being “in charge” of explaining parts was helpful for them to absorb better.

I totally agree with your order and building from one thing to the next. The kids really liked it. They liked feeling more confident in their searching and helping their classmates. So it was a great lesson and refresher. They didn’t complain and actually asked if there were more in this style. And, I said yes! So, they were looking forward to working together in this way. Working in groups is not a new thing but using it to make the kids the coach and “expert” in a given area gives them more ownership.

Veteran adviser who tested out the AP Stylebook lessons

WHO WAS THIS MADE FOR?

Anyone. As a teacher hired by a dyed-in-the-wool, cooperative-learning school, I had lots of learning to do as someone who isn’t traditionally an educator. I once relied on the traditional, warmup-presentation-practice-quiz method where individuals succeeded or failed on their own. While there are many fantastic resources out there for journalism educators (JEA, ATPI, and any state scholastic group), there was simply a lack of resources I could use as a starting place.

The lessons cover fundamental concepts. These are good for teaching cover to cover for a introductory journalism class or as one-day refreshers for advanced staffs. For example, I noticed my advanced publication photographers were struggling with writing captions. I stopped production for one day and ran the caption writing lesson. The captions got much better. One day of learning saved me many days of banging my head against my keyboard over poorly done captions.

For veteran advisers moving into the cooperative learning world (or expanding their existing lesson bank), this project becomes one guy’s opinion on how to teach these concepts in a cooperative way. You probably don’t need the content, but the method to teach the concepts. Use what you like. Leave what you don’t. Tweak. Replace. Add. Subtract. I may not explain a concept as well or in depth as you may like. Love that! Adjust the cards, worksheets or lessons to fit when and what you want students to learn. I’m a believer that there are thousands of ways to successfully teach students. I’m also a believer in this method.

New advisers (whether new to teaching, new to journalism, or both) will find these as not only a way to have some go-to lessons and ready-made content for their classrooms, but also start them off in a way that more closely matches what publication staffs do. The products they make are done so cooperatively, why not learn that way as well? Journalism advising is a daunting task. Hopefully this eases some of the pressures