Cooperative Learning and Paper Planes

I attempted to do both a cooperative learning and paper folding teaching technique in my summer school class. Neither went off as smoothly as I had planned but both taught be about the capabilities of my students and myself as a teacher.

The cooperative learning technique involved the students reading news articles (one from Time Magazine and one from the NY Times). They were broken into groups, with each person having a different role. They were to summarize and talk about the articles within the groups and then each group would teach each other about the article.

That approach fell flat and I could have seen it coming from a mile away. For some reason the kids didn't feel like talking about the article. A lot of them didn't really understand nor care what it was about until I talked about it (thus ruining the whole cooperative thing). The presentations and the group discussion went OK as long as I prodded the whole thing along.

I am thinking it was my fault for picking such hard content for them to work through. It also stalled because the kids weren't really the whole group structure for some reason. They seem to get a lot more out of it when I am the one doing the interacting with them. Part of me suspects they don't have the academic confidence a lot of the time to just read something and tell me their opinions about it.

This is something I am going to have to work on big time. I need to find approachable stuff and do a better job creating a space where conversations/ideas flow freely.

As I mentioned before, I also tried a paper folding activity. It wasn't really out of the book but it was related to the lesson at hand. After we went over following directions and procedures on the MCT I decided to mix it up and have a paper airplane folding. I gave each student a set of directions for a particular type of paper airplen and had them make them. It was pretty fun and for the most part a productive affair. It was a good end of week treat as well.

I don't think I will doing it in the fall since I will have considerably more than six students and control of the room would be tenous at best. It would take a while before I ever feel confident doing such an activity in my class.