Cooperative Learning Reflection

My understanding of learning is that it is an enduring process where groups and individuals enrich themselves with knowledge, ideas, skills and beliefs, along with the ability to preserve information. I feel that people can learn more from experiences and reflections. Kolb’s (2007) experiential learning cycle observes learning as an integrated process and my understanding of this is that all four stages need to be incorporated in order to achieve fruitful learning, nonetheless, it is possible that a learner can be better suited to one of the stages over the other. For instance, a learner may prefer ‘hands-on’ learning because they are accustomed to engaging in practical work while another learner with an imaginative mind might come up with

1981). Therefore, the reason why I encourage group work is because when students are sitting in their assigned groups them with their peers of different abilities, this encourages peer tutoring to promote higher achievement and productivity rather than an individualistic effort (Johnson et al, 2000). In a lesson, I planned to incorporate carousel brainstorming into my teaching practices, because, this method allows students to access background information or review what they have learned by thinking about subtopics within the main topic. For instance, a time where I used snowballing, prior knowledge and brainstorm carousel in the in a lesson, I assigned each a topic on renewable energy and asked them to note down everything they already knew about the topic and once they were done they passed it on to the next group and so on. The purpose of this exercise was that this is a form of formative assessment and by the time when the first group receives their sheet back they would have a clearer idea of the concepts contributed by the entire class. When I am starting a new topic my aim is to encourage students to discuss what they already know about the topic so that we can build upon the concept later on (Tobias,