Cooperative Education

Education majors study various different types of education methods. Cooperative education is a type of teaching and learning style that works well in formal settings. If you need research on cooperative education, have the writters at Paper Masters custom write a project that outlines all the elements of this education style.

The field of education is constantly seeking new and better ways to educate students for a lifetime of learning. Rote memorization and lecture are no longer the standard. One of the leading ideas current within the field of education is that of cooperative learning. Cooperative education aims to organize classroom activity so that students work together, in groups, in order to collectively reach a goal.

In the first half of the 20th century, a number of theorists discovered that group work was far more efficient and effective in learning. John Dewey, in particular, believed that students needed to learn knowledge and skills that would be far more beneficial outside of the classroom, as active participants in democracy. From these theoretical underpinnings, cooperative education emerged.

There are three basic types of cooperative education.

1. Formal cooperative learning is a facilitated group work, such as problem solving, or laboratory work, and is easily adaptable to any curriculum.
2. Informal cooperative learning has the teacher in a more passive role, with small group discussion at its core. Groups forge over time to contribute to each other's knowledge base.
3. Base group learning, the third type, is a long-term approach that is most effective for learning complex material, which makes peers accountable to each other. Within these three types are a myriad of educational techniques that a teacher can employ.

The research writers at Paper Masters have been instrumental in providing greater insight into the group political processes that take place within cooperative learning environments and in illustrating how these dynamics resolve themselves in children. By preparing a case study scenario with a series of predetermined questions, worksheets, and other apparatus, these researchers were able to outline the processes that enable learning to take place within a group learning environment such as cooperative learning. Considering the complex and sometimes egregiously overly wrought definitions that researchers apply to learning theories:

viewed collaborative learning as part of a process leading to the social construction of knowledge. Other scholars ...considered cooperative learning to be a form of critical pedagogy that moves classrooms and societies closer toward ...social justice...characterized collaborative learning as a process in which "knowledge is not transferred from expert to learner, but created and located in the learning environment...

Obviously, it is easy to get lost in the semantics of the learning theory and lose touch with what makes it work in the first place which is, or should be the true focus.