1. Moroccan Association of Teachers of English
Casablanca MATE Day
Friday 23rd, November 2012
Enhancing students’ Autonomy
through Collaborative Learning
Abdeslam Badre
abdeslambadre@yahoo.com
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3. Outine
• Why do we need Autonomous learners?
• What is the purpose of Collaborative
learning?
• How could it be implemented?
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Abdeslam Badre - Cablanca - Nov. 2012

4. How autonomous are Moroccan
Students?
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5. Moroccan Student’s perception of
Autonomy and Collaboration
• In-class, Do you prefer group-work tasks/activities
or individual activities?
Imagine you came to class, and did not find the
teacher, but a note that read:
“ there students, today I am going to be 30 minutes
late, so please feel free to do any activity, till I
arrive”?Your teacher.
• What would you do?
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6. Moroccan Student’s perception of
Autonomy and Collaboration
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7. I. Developing Autonomous Learners
Self-Access Lge.
Learning
Students’
Knowledge about
Knowledge
Acquisition Imagination
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8. Developing Autonomous Learners
• Self-Access Lge Learners: Ss’ understanding of who they are,
their perceptions and memories of their life experiences and social interactions, as
well as their hopes and dreams of the person they would like to become
• Learners’ Meta-cognition: what a learner knows about how he
or she learns a language; and, therefore, view it as a process of relating the
language learning to the self
• Imagination : people learn by becoming members of communities
of practice, as they participate in the activities of these social groups, they
learn from the more experienced, knowledgeable members. In terms of
language learning, this means that learners might imagine themselves
participating in target language communities.
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9. II. Cooperative Learning
• What is it?
• What is it not?
• There are three basic ways students can interact with
each other as they learn:
• They can compete to see who is "best";
• They can work individualistically on their own toward a
goal without paying attention to other students;
• They can work cooperatively with a vested interest in
each other’s learning as well as their own.
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10. Criteria for effective cooperative learning groups
include:
• Students understand that their membership in a learning group means that they either succeed or
fail—together: Acceptance by a group that they "sink or swim together.
• "Positive interdependence" includes mutual goals, joint rewards, resource interdependence (each
group member has different resources that must be combined to complete the assignment), and
role interdependence (each group member is assigned a specific role).
• Students help each other learn and encourage individual team members' success.
• Individuals in the group understand that they are accountable to each other and to the group as a
distinct unit.
• Interpersonal and small-group skills are in place, including communication, decision making,
conflict resolution, and time management.
• Members are aware of the group's processes. Individual members talk about "the group" as a
unique entity.
• Organizing students in heterogeneous cooperative learning groups at least once a week has a
significant effect on learning
• Low-ability students perform worse when grouped in homogeneous ability groups
• Cooperative learning can be ineffective when support structures are not in place
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11. Benefits
It promotes:
• Team Work Spirit
• Recognizing the importance of each member of the group
• Promoting learning
• Helping shy students come out of their shell
Students
• Enjoy the learning process and achieve more
• Learn to communicate well with each other and have a more
positive expectation about working with others
• More positive about school, subject areas, and teachers or
professors
• More positive about each other – regardless of differences in ability,
ethnic background, handicapped or not.
• More able to take the perspective of others and more positive
about taking part in controversy
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12. Planning the Cooperative learning
1. Select a lesson
2. Select the groups’ size
3. Assign the students to groups
4. Arrange the classroom.
5. Provide the appropriate materials: ( one answer
sheet to be turned in by the group or "jigsaw”)
6. Explain the task & structure : A clear and specific
description of the task needs to be given coupled with an explanation of
the group goal
7. Teacher Group-Monitoring: cooperative group does not
take the place of instruction, but instead translates it and makes it useful.
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13. Your Role:
• Determine what skills are lacking (subject-matter &interaction)
• Set up a way for the groups to process, discuss & how
to do even better
• Intervene to help groups work out their own problems
• Use a variety of strategies when choosing students for
groups (common clothing, favorite colors, letters in names, birthdays)
• Support new groups: Meet with new group members to support their success.
Teach specific skills before grouping students, define criteria for success, and develop rubrics for
key expectations
• monitor carefully how well the groups are functioning
• Facilitate success
• Don't use cooperative learning for all instructional
goals
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14. Remember!
– It is also important to establish criteria for success as a classroom in
order to make intergroup cooperation possible and extend the
cooperativeness across the class
– It is also necessary to specify the basic behaviors you expect to see in
the groups so that students have an "operational" definition of what
cooperation is
– Quick consensus without discussion does not enhance learning as
effectively as having different perspectives discussed, arguing different
alternatives, explaining
– A lot of the power for learning in cooperative groups come from the
need for discussion, explanation, justification, and shared resolution
on the material being learned
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15. Some Cooperative Learning Classroom Activities
1. Discussion: A good give-and-take discussion can produce unmatched learning
experiences as students articulate their ideas, respond to their
classmates' points
2. Think-pair-share: provides the opportunity to reflect on the question posed
and then practice sharing and receiving potential solutions
3. Group grid: Students practice organizing and classifying information in a table
4. Three-step interview: Students are first paired and take turns interviewing
each other using a series of questions provided by the instructor. Pairs then match
up and students introduce their original partner. At the end of the exercise, all
students have had their position or viewpoints on an issue heard
5. Note-taking pairs: Designing an exercise which requires students to
summarize their understanding of a concept based on notes and receiving
reflective feedback from their partner provides students the opportunity to find
critical gaps in their written records.
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16. Some Cooperative Learning Classroom Activities…
6. Jigsaw: this structure provides students the opportunity to develop expertise in
one of many components of a problem by first participating in a group solely
focused on a single component. In the second stage of the exercise, groups are
reformed with a representative from each expert group who together now have
sufficient expertise to tackle the whole problem
7. Graphic organizers: powerful tools for converting complex information in to
meaningful displays...They can provide a framework for gathering and sorting ideas
for discussion, writing, and research
8. Sequence chains: The goal of this exercise is to provide a visual representation
of a series of events, actions, roles, or decisions. Students can be provided with
the items to be organized or asked to first generate these based on a
predetermined end goal. This structure can be made more complex by having
students also identify and describe the links between each of the sequenced
components
9. Dyadic essays: Students prepare for the in-class portion of this exercise by
developing an essay question and model answer based on assigned reading.
Students typically need to be guided to develop questions that integrate material
across classes. Then, they exchange essay questions and write a spontaneous
answer essay; then, compare and contrast the model answer and the
spontaneously generated answer
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17. Some Cooperative Learning Classroom Activities…
10. Peer editing: As opposed to the editing process that often appears only at the
final stage of a paper, peer editing pairs up students at the idea generation stage
and peers provide feedback throughout the process. For example, the relationship
begins as each student in the pair describes their topic ideas and outlines the
structure of their work while their partner asks questions, and develops an outline
based on what is described.
11. Send-a-problem: Students participate in a series of problem solving rounds,
contributing their independently generated solution to those that have been
developed by other groups. After a number of rounds, students are asked to
review the solutions developed by their peers, evaluate the answers and develop a
final solution
12. Three-stay, one-stray: Even students working in groups can benefit from the
feedback of additional peers. In this structure, students periodically take a break
from their work and send one group member to another group to describe their
progress. The role of the group is to gain information and alternative perspectives
by listening and sharing. The number of times the group sends a representative to
another group depends on the level of complexity of the problem. This method
can also be used to report out final solutions.
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18. Example: Jigsaw
• Divide students into 5- or 6-person jigsaw groups. The groups should be diverse in terms of gender,
ethnicity, race, and ability.
• Appoint one student from each group as the leader. Initially, this person should be the most mature
student in the group.
• Divide the day's lesson into 5-6 segments. For example, if you want history students to learn about
Eleanor Roosevelt, you might divide a short biography of her into stand-alone segments on: (1) Her
childhood, (2) Her family life with Franklin and their children, (3) Her life after Franklin contracted
polio, (4) Her work in the White House as First Lady, and (5) Her life and work after Franklin's death.
• Assign each student to learn one segment, making sure students have direct access only to their
own segment.
• Give students time to read over their segment at least twice and become familiar with it. There is
no need for them to memorize it.
• Form temporary "expert groups" by having one student from each jigsaw group join other students
assigned to the same segment. Give students in these expert groups time to discuss the main
points of their segment and to rehearse the presentations they will make to their jigsaw group.
• Bring the students back into their jigsaw groups.
• Ask each student to present her or his segment to the group. Encourage others in the group to ask
questions for clarification.
• Float from group to group, observing the process. If any group is having trouble (e.g., a member is
dominating or disruptive), make an appropriate intervention. Eventually, it's best for the group
leader to handle this task. Leaders can be trained by whispering an instruction on how to intervene,
until the leader gets the hang of it.
• At the end of the session, give a quiz on the material so that students quickly come to realize that
these sessions are not just fun and games but really count.
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19. Conclusion
• Having students work together cooperatively is a powerful way for them to learn and
has positive effects on the classroom climate
• Being able to perform technical skills such as reading, speaking, listening, writing,
computing, problem-solving, etc., are valuable but of little use if the person cannot
apply those skills in cooperative interaction with other people in career, family, and
community settings
• The most logical way to emphasize the use of student’s knowledge and skills within a
cooperative framework, such as they will meet as members of society, is to spend
much of the time learning those skills in cooperative relationships with each other
• The ability of all students to learn to work cooperatively with others is the keystone to
building and maintaining stable marriages, families, careers, and friendships.
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20. Thank you!
abdeslambadre@yahoo.com
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