Overcoming Resistance to Kagan Structures for Engagement(continued)

5. If I change everything, I don't know what will happen. "I have been teaching using traditional methods for years. I know what to expect. So do my students. I don't know what will happen if I leap into a whole new way of teaching." This, like the other fears, is legitimate. Leaping into something new is always intimidating. My suggestion: Don't leap. Instead, ease in. Try just one simple structure and get comfortable with that. For example, after asking a question of the class simply have students turn to someone in the row next to them and pair up to do a RallyRobin or a Timed Pair Share. Then have them move their chairs back and return to the traditional class instructional methods.
   
   While students are interacting in pairs, observe their level of engagement. Listen in to their responses. If your class is like almost every other class anywhere in the world, you will find your students more engaged with the curriculum. Do this a number of times on different days with the same structure but different content until you and the students are comfortable with the structure you have chosen. When you are ready, ease into another structure. Don't move out of your comfort zone. With time, you will become more comfortable with the structures and, seeing their positive effect, start using them more frequently.
   
   Notice: You can ease into Kagan Structures before you ever set up teams in your classroom. Many pair structures are available and you can have students pair up on a regular basis. With time, you will want to move up to teamwork structures as there are benefits that result that cannot be obtained if you just use pair structures. But pair structures, even if used only briefly, are a very powerful addition to your instructional repertoire.
   
6. Cooperative learning is blind leading blind. Some teachers fear cooperative learning is just the blind leading the blind. I have important things to share and I am a trained teacher; it is not appropriate to have students do the teaching. Teachers know they know and can teach the content better than can their students, so why would we ever turn teaching over to the students? This fear is based on a misconception: That somehow when we do cooperative learning we abdicate our role as teacher. Nothing could be further from the truth. The cooperative learning structures are designed to have students review facts and master skills that have been taught by the teacher. We couple the best of direct instruction with the best of practice. Rather than have students practice alone, not getting the encouragement, feedback, coaching, and praise that improves learning, we have students work in pairs or teams to practice. But that practice follows rather than replaces the best of direct instruction. If we present information to students and do not have them process that information, the information stays in short-term memory and is soon forgotten. To move information into long-term memory students need to construct meaning. They need to think about the information, connect it to prior knowledge, question it, and interact over it. As they do, the information becomes their own and moves into long-term memory. Cooperative interaction compliments rather than replaces teacher input.
   
7. It won't work. "I tried cooperative learning and it did not work. Why should I try Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures?" This fear is frequent among teachers who have tried other methods of cooperative learning.
   
   Many teachers have done what they think is good cooperative learning but have just done group work. Group work is not carefully structured, so some students can do most or even all of the work while others take a free ride. Learning and engagement does not result for all students. The high achievers, who least need the practice, do most of the talking and get most of the practice while the low achievers, who most need the practice, do little or even nothing. Unstructured interaction is just group work, not true cooperative learning. Kagan Structures, in contrast, are very carefully designed so there is equal participation and each student is held accountable for her/his contribution. Unfortunately, many teachers have done some sort of unstructured group work thinking it was cooperative learning, and when they found it did not work, they concluded cooperative learning does not work. They have not experienced the power of carefully designed structures for engagement.

These Structures Aren't Appropriate for My Students

8. These Structures Aren't Appropriate for My Students

   8. This fun and game stuff is not appropriate for secondary and college/university.
   9. It is a competitive world; we need to prepare students for the real world.
   10. Cooperative learning makes students dependent on their group; they need to become independent.
   11. Students have to take the test alone; cooperative learning doesn't prepare them for that.
   12. Traditional competitive/individualistic instruction prepares students for college and university.
   13. We need differentiated instruction; students of different ability levels need to work on developmentally appropriate content.
   14. We need individualized instruction. Each student needs to progress at his or her own pace.
   15. I have special needs students. Autistic students can't cooperate.
   16. My students won't be able to cooperate.
   17. I have multi-grade classrooms and each grade has different content.
   18. My students don't like cooperative learning.
   This fun and game stuff is not appropriate for secondary and college/university. "I am a secondary (or college) teacher (or professor). My job is not to play games; I am serious educator." Some secondary teachers and college/ university professors misperceive cooperative learning structures as appropriate only for elementary teachers. The research, as well as the experience of thousands of secondary and college teachers, does not support this. Meta-analyses reveal Cooperative Learning outperforms traditional learning at all grade levels. A great proportion of our trainings are for secondary teachers: Of the 60,000 teachers we train each year, 41% are in workshops for elementary school teachers and 28% are in workshops for secondary teachers. The remaining 30% of our workshops are mixed grade-level with elementary and secondary teachers learning the structures at the same time. The structures are grade-level free and are just as useful for secondary and elementary teachers. Whereas an elementary school teacher may have their students use a RallyRobin to name objects in the room with a right angle, a secondary school teacher may use the same structure to have students name literary techniques employed by an author. Secondary cooperative learning books rank among Kagan Publishing's most popular titles. Our book sales reflect the popularity of cooperative learning for secondary teachers: Of books that can be identified by grade level, Primary teachers purchase 19%; elementary teachers, 41%; secondary teachers a full 40%! Secondary students love the chance to interact over the content. And by interacting over the content, discussing and debating it, they make the content their own. It becomes more memorable. Secondary students in traditional schools pass from class to class in which the dominant instructional strategy is lecture. Because they are not actively engaged they become bored and find school and content uninteresting. When allowed to engage with each other over the content, students come alive. A lecture is often "in one ear and out the other." Translation: it is held in short-term memory but never moves to long-term memory because the content is not processed. When content is processed via interaction, dendrite connections are formed with prior knowledge. The content is linked to emotion, making the probability of memory dramatically greater. I taught at the University of California. My upper division classes were evaluated highest in the department and I am sure it was because students were actively engaged via cooperative learning structures. The traditional lecture format treats students as empty vessels to be filled with wisdom dispensed from the professor. Cooperative learning respects students as the active constructors of knowledge that they are. Active engagement strategies align with brain science; they respect rather than discount the intelligence and creativity of students.
   
9. It is a competitive world; we need to prepare students for the real world. As we have moved into a high-tech workplace, collaborative skills are increasingly at a premium. No person working alone can build a computer. No person working alone can build a component of a computer. It is teams coordinating efforts with other teams that produce today's high-tech products. Collaborative skills, teamwork and communication skills, top the list of employability skills in every survey of employers.³ Only by working with others do students acquire the interpersonal skills that lead to success in the service segment of the economy. Only by working with others do they acquire the leadership skills that predict their success in any corporation. At Kagan Publishing and Professional Development, we have worked with scores of employees. It is interpersonal skills more than technical skills that predict success among our managers. It is ability to work with others that most often predicts whether an employee gets fired or gets a promotion. This is true in almost all corporations. The ability of a corporation to compete is dependent on the ability of its employees to cooperate. The ability to cooperate predicts success also in academics. The world of research has become so technical that it is teams, not individuals working alone, that author most technical research papers. Often the authors of a single research study papers are different teams at different universities coordinating their efforts.
   
   It is important not to fall into either-or thinking. Just because we advocate frequent use of cooperative learning structures, we do not throw out competition. There is value in competition, as well as cooperation. We do not advocate abandoning competition; we advocate including cooperation in the diet. We want a balanced rather than one-sided experience for students, knowing there are important lessons to be learned from each type of social interaction.
   
10. Cooperative learning makes students dependent on their group; they need to become independent. Many forms of group work do allow students to take a free ride. For example, if students are assigned a project and each will get the grade of the project, then an adaptive strategy of a low achiever is to let the high achievers in the group do the project. For this reason, we advocate never giving group grades. All Kagan Structures are carefully designed to include individual accountability. Each student must make an independent contribution.
    
    Here, too, it is important not to fall into either-or thinking. Just because we advocate frequent use of cooperative learning structures, we do not devalue individual work. There is value in individual work. We want a balanced rather than one-sided experience for students, knowing there are important lessons to be learned from each type of social interaction.
    
    Too often after direct instruction, teachers have students leap into independent practice. Some students did not fully understand the direct instruction and struggle with the independent practice or even practice wrong. By inserting guided practice between direct instruction and independent practice with structures like RallyCoach or Sage-N-Scribe, the independent practice is much more successful.
    
    We identify strongly with the goal of having students become independent learners. The question is how best to do that. If during direct instruction the teacher pauses to have students interact over the content, the students process the content and understand and retain the content better. Later when they work alone, they have more to draw from. They are stronger independent learners. Similarly, if they interact and give each other feedback before working alone on problems, they are more likely to do well on their own. When guided practice precedes independent practice, the independent work is more accurate and at a higher level.
    
11. Students have to take the test alone; cooperative learning doesn't prepare them for that. Cooperative learning is for learning, not for test taking. Students need to be evaluated based on what they can do alone. But well-structured cooperative learning does prepare students for taking tests alone. All of the Kagan Structures for engagement involve individual accountability. While students are practicing skills in cooperative learning structures, they are performing alone. For example in RallyCoach, first Student A does a problem alone, and receives feedback from her/his partner. Then Student B does a problem alone and receives feedback. In poorly structured group work, students work together and the high achiever takes over. This does not prepare the lower achieving students. Hundreds of empirical studies of the results of cooperative learning demonstrate beyond a doubt that cooperative learning does prepare students for test taking: They score higher on tests than if they worked alone in traditional formats.⁴
    
12. Traditional competitive/individualistic instruction prepares students for college and university. Whereas it is true that most colleges and universities structure courses in individualist and competitive ways, that is changing. The University of Maryland, Arizona State, and MIT restructured their physics programs to include collaborative work and have tripled their gains!⁵ Some colleges make cooperative learning the primary mode of instruction and have abandoned traditional methods entirely.⁶ The result: dramatically greater success rates. But even if all colleges and universities had no cooperative work, it is a false assumption that the best way to prepare students for college/university work would be to exclude cooperative work in elementary and secondary schools. The empirical data is clear: Students have more academic success when cooperative learning is used.⁷ And students who are better prepared academically will have more success when they enter college/university. Further, studies by Uri Treisman at the University of California, Berkeley, showed that entering freshmen who formed study groups had dramatically lower drop-out rates and greater success rates.⁸ Students who have experienced cooperative learning in their pre-college education are more likely to form study groups. At the highest levels of education, studying to be a lawyer or a doctor, collaborative study groups are the norm.
    
13. We need differentiated instruction; students of different ability levels need to work on developmentally appropriate content. "I have students at different levels. Heterogeneous teams will drag down the high achievers." In many structures there is a natural differentiation. For example, during Timed Pair Share, each student responds to the teacher's question for a set amount of time, say one minute. If a high achiever is paired with a low achiever, there is a built-in differentiation because each responds at their level. Many of the structures for engagement allow students to respond at their own developmentally appropriate level.
    
    In your class, if students work with different content or worksheets, during that time students can break out from their heterogeneous teams and work in pairs or groups that are homogeneous by ability level. For example, students might all be doing RallyCoach, but some pairs working on worksheets of an easier level, yet other pairs at a more difficult level, and some at a very difficult level. Students are not high, middle, or low across all curriculum content. A student who is quite high in math might be quite low in reading. To solve this problem we form different, homogeneous pairs for their math work and their reading work.
    
    We like to offer a warning. Students live up to or down to our expectations. As Loraine Monroe says, "What is good for the best, is good for the rest." When we raise our expectations for all students, all students rise to our expectations.⁹ Differentiating the curriculum should be our last rather than our first response to perceived differences in ability. Often what we perceive as differences in ability are really simply differences in performance which disappear when we structure for engagement of all students.

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