Teachers must give adequate attention to teaching social skills and monitoring for total team involvement if they are to introduce cooperative learning successfully. Interpersonal skills are more important than positive interdependence, face-to-face interaction, individual accountability, or group processing skills. Includes five references. (MLH)

A bullying incident provided a consultant/substitute teacher with an opportunity to use conflict as a teachable moment for social learning. Victimized students acknowledged aggressive behavior, allowed it to emerge, and through the group's efforts, modified a potentially destructive situation into socially productive endeavors. Offenders were…

A facilitator of workshops and assemblies on social skills recounts revealing dialogs with elementary and middle-level students. Discussion, often accompanied by singing and guitar music, focuses on the issues of belonging, fitting in, making friends, offering support, and practicing empathy. The music is the vehicle for helping students express…

Cooperative learning can benefit all students, whether "average," low-achieving, gifted, or mainstreamed. Teachers trained at the University of Minnesota's Cooperative Learning Center expect to see students in small, heterogeneous groups using special skills and caring about each others' learning. Tips on cooperative spelling groups are…

Grace Pilon's Workshop Way system succeeds because it communicates inner security to students and promotes intelligent self-control. Program components include specific teacher guidance, high and intelligent student involvement, daily student-teacher contact, satisfaction of diverse needs, promotion of living-learning truths, and respect for…

Some schools do a poor job of preparing youth for responsible adulthood. The root problems seem to be failure to perceive adequately the urgency of the socialization problem and the tendency to oversimplify the measures needed to correct the situation. (Author/MLF)