LASH presentation (Laura Sanz)

I really learn a lot with their first presentation.

They were the last group so I thought (and almost all the class) that they would do very well because they had the opportunity to change their work more times than the rest of the groups. But it was not the case.  We are all the time expecting something (feed-forward) and the world gives us something (feed-back) sometimes different and sometimes the same as we expected.

There could be a lot of reasons that made they didn´t do a good work. It is curious that we often ignore this factors despite of they are so important.

Hector hadn´t a commitment, well he had one but it was really estrange, he said he put the first thing he thought/find. As he said “Puse eso por poner algo”, in our daily lives we do a lot of things by obligation and some of them haven´t got any value because we don´t make them ours. A commitment cannot be an obligation. Many teachers forced children to have X commitment, I think this is stupid. A real commitment is something volunteer and each people need to have some motivations and reasons to have this X commitment. I think this should be worked and reflected with pupils. They are free to have the commitment they want.

Going back to this group, they had the opportunity to make again their exposition. This is putting into practice the theory we are learning, one of the main idea of cooperative learning is: IPROVE.

One of the problems of education is to separate the theory and the practice and not to connect the learning with the real live. In my opinion, this is not learning. Luckily, in this subject and in almost all of our subjects it doesn´t happen.

I was really surprised with their second presentation. Maybe due to I didn´t expect they would do as well as they did (another feed-forward and feed-back). This second presentation was very similar to the rest of presentations; they used the jigsaw technique too. They divided the class in two groups (the students that don´t know how to cooperate and the others that can do it) to make the basic groups. I think this is a good distribution of the class if we want they learn how to be cooperative. I know it now, before this subject I didn´t think this. I have learnt this doing our presentation. This group made a mistake the first time they did their exposition because they divided the class in these two groups: “Intelligent students and not” or something similar.  But the second time they did well. It is a common distribution nowadays but it is not correct in a cooperative way of learning and teaching. Not all the students with excellent calcifications are cooperative, most of them are not.

In this second presentation this group used bad the TGT technique. It is a common mistake because this technique is not cooperative at all. They used the competition despite they didn´t wanted to use it. Once again they modified it thanks to the teacher´s explanation. This is one of the best parts of the cooperative learning: We are all the time learning and we always have the opportunity to improve.

Laura.