Small group inquiry changes the leadership role of the teacher to create an open classroom and focus on the social and intellectual development of the student as a future thinking and adaptive citizen, not just a reluctant member of an audience for specialized information. (Author)

The small-group process is discussed in relation to its use as a teaching method; the objections to and advantages of small groups are enumerated, and numerous group interaction diagrams are listed. Also, various exercises and guidelines for successful group application are presented. A final section is devoted to the different kinds of groups and…

Student team techniques, involving two conceptually distinct components--a cooperative reward structure, in which students are evaluated and rewarded based on the performance of the group as a whole, and a cooperative task structure, in which students are encouraged to peer tutor--have had positive effects compared to control methods on academic…

This booklet describes the learning experiences that take place in and as a result of a learning laboratory. Part one presents a brief history of the group dynamics movement, focusing especially upon the history of the National Training Laboratory of the National Education Association. Some significant characteristics of laboratory learning are…

A questionnaire on use of cooperative learning was distributed to all faculty (76 respondents) in the College of Technical Careers at Southern Illinois-Carbondale (SIUC) and a sample of the membership (66 respondents) of the American Technical Education Association (ATEA). For both samples, the main use of groupwork was with laboratory…

A cooperative activity involving eight sixth grade students over five days focused on inventing static representations of motion. In generating, critiquing and refining numerous representations, strong metarepresentational competence was found. An intricate blend of the children's conceptual and interactional skills, their interest in and sense of…

This two-volume set offers 16 narrative case studies and a facilitator's guide. Cases were written by teachers about their personal experiences with teaching and groupwork, especially the problematic situations and dilemmas they faced. Groupwork is a well-documented and highly recommended strategy for enhancing students' academic, cognitive,…

Social contact through informal speech, a basic adolescent need, can be most effectively developed in secondary schools through the learning, working, and creating situations of drama activities. Since drama is conflict and living language is action, the process of making a play is as important as the play. Thus, drama creation within a small…

An American history class in Melbourne, Florida, provides an opportunity for tenth grade students to experience the reality of interpersonal interaction and small group cooperation in the classroom. The first three days of the year-long course are used to identify leaders and to assign groups, numbering five to seven students. In addition to…

Peter Elbow's concepts of "pointing,""summarizing,""telling," and "showing" can form an effective method for training students to give reader-based feedback to peer writing. In pointing, students jot down all the words and phrases they can remember from an oral reading of a draft. These lists stimulate…