Cooperative Learning Workshop at Chung Lun

Sharing what I have learned about Cooperative Learning

Gorgeous campus of Chung Lun

Being invited to share my teaching practices with regard to Cooperative Learning many times, I got to sit through all the presentations of participants’ collaborative lesson planning for the very first time today. I picked up many brilliant ideas and definitely will give it a try in my class, and they are listed as follows.

1. Making sentences with a deck of cards + Team Game Tournament

With the given PPT slide shown, students working in groups have to put together a correct sentence from a deck of cards comprised of subjects, verbs, objects, time and so on. To make sure students of all the three levels can be engaged equally, we can call on one of each group to compete with each other.  

2. Story Elements + Jigsaw

This can be served as a framework for students to analyze any dialogues or readings in the textbooks. Also, involved in Jigsaw activity, students work in groups to elaborate on one of the elements by creating a poster and doing a little oral report with it.

3. Jigsaw Reading + Literature Circle

Based on the number of students in each group, divide the text into parts so that each group takes one part and accordingly elaborate on it with tasks like discussion, vocabulary, grammar, summary, translation and so on.

Obviously, Jigsaw and Literature are quite popular among the participants after my introduction to how to implement them in an authentic setting. This workshop gave me the opportunity not only to demonstrate how some teaching strategies are quite useful but “steal” many good ideas from the presenters.