Co-Operative Practice and Philosophy of Working Together - Essay Example

Management Reflective The application of corporative learning in schools have demonstrated achievement of overwhelmingly positive academic effectiveness (Johnson & Johnson, 2005). Corporative learning allows students to work together and undertakes activities and tasks that promote their learning and improve other important learning dimensions such as social and personal development, enhanced race relations, academic gains, increased patriotism and interpersonal relations amongst others. According to a report by (Brown & Ciuffetelli Parker, 2009), it was concluded that students who participated in group activities through corporative learning exhibited good relationship with other people, provided constructive feedback and received higher course grades and test scores in their examination. Nevertheless, despite the recommendations for the use of corporative learning as a solution to most of education challenges, there are other limitations that pose difficulties for co-operative members as they seek to combine individual skills and enthusiasm with a set of collective values and principles (Sheehy, 2004). Co-operative members face the challenge of implementing their strategies effective such that every member contributes effectively to the activities of the group. Most of the times students fail to grasp individual accountability and positive interdependence in the right way results in some members perform most of the task and other just signing off as if they did the work but ultimately claim they took part in the activities. Furthermore, there is the tendency of the emergence of the ‘bossy’ students who is usually think they perform better than others and therefore refuse to allow the contribution of members considered to be poor in academics (Kagan & Kagan, 2009). Eventually, come students will learn nothing from the group. Corporative learning was developed based on the educational rationale that was propagated from socialization needs as opposed to academic needs. This perspective can be disadvantageous to some of the corporative members (Johnson & Johnson, 2005). Member contribution is seen as a way of achieving a social entitlement and therefore, low achievers are belittled by the higher achievers. Moreover, making the ultimate educational goal as a group affair inhibits individual education (Johnson & Johnson, 2005). Group contingencies are also responsible for development of peer pressure as members try hard to conform to influenced behavior, which can be very detrimental. Peer pressure is highly inherent in groups with many cases of conflicts as members try to achieve consensus by making affiliations with others to suppress the differences. Corporative learning can fail to promote shared collective values and principles especially where some students have issues with their self-esteem or are highly reserved but in the company of highly opinionated students. Reserved students may fail to contribute to the group for fear of being judged or corporative members’ negative responses. Their performance is threatened by the fear that other members will harbor very little opinion of themselves and therefore, they get very uncomfortable in group activities. This may lead to successful experience thereby hindering the achievement of some students and that of the group at large (Johnson & Johnson, 2005). Corporative learning can lead to open hostility and frustration among the students when the groups are not properly structured, mostly due to the different entry levels of the students. High achievers in the class may feel that they are being held back by the low-performing students. On the other hand, the academically weak students get agitated for being ignored or discounted in the group. As such resentments build, members become very bitter with each other and conflict pills up. As a result, the performance of the group as a whole is below the individual capacity of members (Sheehy, 2004). Cooperative learning is defined by five principles which we applied in our corporative group. They are: positive interdependence, individual accountability, quality of group processing, teaching of cooperative skills, and teaching of social skills. Implementation of these principles exposed some of the challenges that we faced while undertaking the preparation of the business plan. In was in charge of the development of the business strategy to be implemented in our business plan. My task was to provide direction and purpose to the business plan through the creation of goals, work tasks and purpose of the business as well as to conduct the implementation and evaluation of the same. As a member in charge of strategy development, I was required to give members a sense of direction by properly coordinating activities of the group and the people with aim of ensuring that the business derived the best out of the strategy. However, I faced a challenge of coordination of activities and group members who were already busy doing their own parts of the group work. I can categorize the problem as arising from the tenet of positive interdependence. This is because I was left to work alone for tasks that needed interaction from different members but such support was not forthcoming (Marzano, 2003). Positive interdependence is used in corporative learning as a tool for enhancing achievement of joint goals and diminishing autonomy of students within a group. Working with the group members provided the feeling that we were implementing the motto “We sink and we swim together” motto”. However, working in the business strategy part of the business plan made me realize that such a concept was fostering conflict in the group. This is because the environment on which the group was based clearly indicated that it was promoting group results. As such, all the individual activities should be geared towards achievement of the ultimate goal. Working alone on the strategy part made me realize that the business strategy is a very important aspect of business and the fact that it was all delegated to me and none of the other members wanted to deliberate anything on it as it was not their part, meant that the group was harboring the danger of fostering dependent and unhealthy relationships where one member knows all about a single sections and absolutely nothing about other segments of the group work. I realized that that meant that I had a greater responsibility to the group than to my own learning which devalued and compromised my ability to come up with the most effective business strategy. This problem can be solved by restructuring the group to enhance positive group interdependence and role interdependence. In positive goal interdependence, members should be informed of their tasks and responsibilities in the group and the evaluation of their part will be based on the comprehension of the whole group material individually as well as collectively. This allows group members to discuss each part of the business plan with the help of the member who researched that part to ensure that all members have access to the same knowledge. Members of the group who score above the set criterion will undergo an individual test, the score of the group would also be required to go beyond a certain criterion and also, evaluation will depend on successful completion of the group project (Marzano, Pickering & Pollock, 2001). This type of group and individual evaluation combined with role independence where all the parts designed to the members are interconnected would solve the problem I experienced. This is because interconnected roles will make members discuss their complementary tasks and deliberate on how the two of more parties are going to effectively complete the joint tasks by making smooth transition through their activities. Furthermore, this solution will prevent some students from being ‘off tasks’ and only letting some of the members do their work for them. Some possible reforms that would reduce or limit this problem for future co-operators would require teachers to develop more valid and reliable measurements for assessment and evaluation of the corporative learning outcomes in order to ensure that the students have mastered the whole concept of the group project as opposed to a single facet they are responsible for researching. The measurements should encompass the four language skills; speaking, listening, writing and reading. To avoid ‘freeloading’ during group work where some members just show up after the work has been done but share in the score of the group, the teacher should transform the ways in which they determine what every student has learnt. In most corporative group, it I very possible to have a small group of members doing all the work while the rest only share in the results without learning anything. Teachers can ensure individual accountability by ensuring that individual contribution can be accounted for in the final group results. I believe that cooperative learning equipped us to contribute sufficiently to the political, spiritual and moral life of a nation as citizens. The major philosophy that was fostered during the group work was democracy. This was enhanced by active participation of the corporative members in individual and collective learning. Such cooperation in learning instils values in corporative members to practice respect of others contribution and opinion, working together for common goal as well as the recognition of equal entitlement and worth of every member regardless of their social class, race, ethnicity, gender, religion or cultural origin (Fearnley-Sander, Moss, & Harbon, 2001). Corporative learning has the potential to develop the feeling of citizenship and civics by fostering civic principles of participation and tolerance. The corporative members were able to develop solidarity by working together, getting to understand each other through interpersonal relationships. Such relationships shape the way we view things outside the group and therefore affect our perception of the world and our behavior. I believe that cooperative learning is a tool for social change for students to develop a mutual trust and interpersonal relationships based on understanding and tolerance while studying, which helps in fostering solidarity in the community where the members go to after school. This will go a long way into reshaping the society which is founded on mutual respect and common values (Schul, 2011). The inclusive practice of cooperative learning helps in fostering equality in the group which can be viewed as a microcosm of our broader society. Corporative groups are structured in a way that ensures that high performing and low performing students are included in a group in a manner that ensures they enhance each other’s academic ability. This method of learning is highly concerned about students with additional needs and the grouping of the students in specific groups is geared towards ensuring that all students achieve progress rather than relying of ability grouping which ultimately distinguishes and separates the students along the lines of weakness. The ways in which our corporative group found ways to support the minority students such as low performing, culturally, religiously or linguistically diverse, show respect and the practice of ensuring that people are not excluded for their needs or for diversity purposes. As such, these skills taught us the process to follow in bid to promote equality and always respond positively to diversity needs of people in the society (Florian & Black-Hawkins, 2011). Corporative learning also instills the motivation of democratic socialization in the classroom. The focus of cooperative groups is to create practical experiences for the students to learn how to interact with each other by challenging their emotive competencies. Being part of the cooperative group challenged our social behavior and the concept of the self which helped us developed the feeling of the need to become better citizens in the future. The feeling of democracy was fostered by eliciting compassion as we learnt the importance of collaboration, team work, building bonds, conflict management, empathy and understanding of cultural diversity (Gollnick and Chinn, 2002). Due to the diversification setting of our school, we experienced the practical multicultural setting in our groups which enhanced our implementation of democratic skills learnt in the group to promote democracy and equity in the society. Proponents of corporative learning recommend this method of learning as it is an instrument of promoting equity and elimination of social inequalities. Corporative classroom require that the students and the teachers engage each other face to face and therefore, both take the role of leading and following sequentially (Slavin, 1995). This enacts power relations in the classroom where the teachers are allowed to use their powers to determine the structure of the groups but students are involved in the process in form of an autocratic setting. The setting of a cooperative class promotes equity by challenging the exploitative power use by authoritative teachers. Our teacher was more of a guide to us and engaged us when making educational decisions. As a result, there was a breakdown of power relations between us and the teacher. From this perspective, we were able to feel that we were fully represented and therefore strategically positioned to analyze, not only the school, but also the societal practice of social justice and equity (Parkey and Stanford, 2010) References Axelrod, R. (1984) The Evolution of Co-operation, London: Penguin Birchall, J. (2008) The Mutualisation of Public Services in Britain: a critical commentary, Journal of Co-operative Studies 41.2:5-16 Conaty, P. Birchall, J. Bendle, S. Foggitt, R. (2005) Common Ground for Mutual Home Ownership: Community land trusts and shared equity co-operatives to secure permanently affordable homes for key workers, Journal of Co-operative Studies 38.2:50-56 Cohen, E.G., Brody, C.M., & SaponShevin, M. (2004). Teaching cooperative learning. The challenge for teacher education. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Evans, P., Gatewood, T., & Green, G. (1993). Cooperative learning: Passing fad or long- term promise? Middle School Journal 42 (3), 3-7. 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