Title:
Group, There It Is: Collaboration, Cooperation and Competition in the Classroom
Description:
Learn how to gamify your everyday traditional and technology-enhanced classroom practices and implement grouping strategies to foster collaboration, cooperation and competition in the math learning environment. Experience the engagement first hand and leave with resources you can use immediately with your young learners. Group: There It Is!
Goals:
After the session learners will be able to:
1) Implement strategies for grouping students for both cooperative and competitive situations.
Participants will interact in a demonstration of how to engage EVERY student in academic discourse and problem solving based on the on the work of John Strebe’s Engaging Mathematics Students Using Cooperative Learning. Learners will cooperate within competitive teams in three modes of learning: respect, defense, and consensus.
2) Organize and manage provided classroom games to allow practice toward mastery of learning targets while also fostering the 4 Cs of 21st Century learning: collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creativity.
Participants will play Cupcake Wars, Math Raffle and Ballin’ With My Content and other gamified, tech-enhanced practice to see first-hand how student engagement in formative assessments increases when collaboration, cooperation and competition drive the learning of ALL students.
Interactive Workshops
Tables are essential to this highly interactive session as participants will be grouped and working collaboratively to compete against other groups. Various hands-on materials will be utilized to engage learners such as marker boards, paper cupcakes, trashketballs, worksheets and calculators. Additionally, teams will be responsible for coming to consensus throughout the session and will need to be engaged in academic conversations within their groups. At various times in the session, participants will be expected to get out of their seats and move around the room in order to participate in many of the games. A traditional seating arrangement would greatly hinder the planned activities.
Equity and Access
When grouping students, participants will be encouraged to consider students’ experiences, personalities, interests, content knowledge and achievement to create balanced groups where every member contributes and feels valued. Due to assigned group roles, students take ownership of their learning through collaborative, competitive teams in which they receive the same high quality mathematical instruction and receive the support needed to be successful and proficient at obtaining learning targets.