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cooperative learning;
Teachers must "live" cooperative groupwork in formal training programs; Teachers need to make conscious connections between the training and classroom and school contexts; Teachers need to build collaborative school cultures that support change and foster continuous learning. The editors note that "most of the contributors to this volume have evolved from focusing on how to change teachers' classroom practices...to considering factors that affect teachers' abilities to sustain change". In this process the contributors have applied the widely accepted lessons accumulated in the field of staff development and skillfully combined them with their specific approaches to cooperative learning. Readers will find that the menu of applications is a rich and varied one that will enhance and support their own work. A nagging feeling after reading the book was that the first goal the editors set for the book and the first question put to contributors to Part II ("How does the research on best staff development practices inform your selection and implementation of cooperative and collaborative learning?") were not satisfactorily answered. By and large cooperative learning is referred to generically. Kagan and Kagan, in their introduction to chapter 5, offer a concise identifying statement: "...cooperative learning approaches all attempt to create promotive social interaction among students about content, with the aim of facilitating academic achievement, thinking skills, and improving social relations and social skills." It's almost as if most of the contributors purposely avoided spelling out their own specific CL methods and strategies. In fact, the concluding statements in all chapters in this section complement each other and in some cases are interchangeable. On the one hand, it may not be necessary to spell out the connection between the way different people approach cooperative learning and the way they approach staff development, as the emphasis in the book is on staff development and not on cooperative learning methods. On the other, it leaves a bit of a void, since the relationship between staff development for cooperative learning and the many methods and strategies is not sufficiently defined. The question remains, are all staff development programs appropriate for all methods? The book definitely provides material for discussion. Roy, in chapter 4, says that "Unfortunately there is not an agreed upon set of essential components shared among the variety of cooperative learning methods" (page 87). Yet most contributors take the trouble to state what they think are the essential components and the degree of similarity is marked. Brody and Davidson, in their introduction, write about the differences between the cooperative and collaborative approaches to teaching and refer to the adaptations made by many of the contributors to the needs of different subject matter areas and grade levels. But then again, in their afterward, they point out that "educators need more discussion regarding research about how teachers learn to adapt and implement cooperative learning" (page 314). It would be interesting to find out if and how the sound principles of staff development, on which all contributors base their work, and what we know today about teachers' attitudes to change relate specifically to the various cooperative learning methods. Are there some methods more readily accepted by teachers? Is this a function of the skill of the facilitator or of the efficacy of the method? The editors and contributors have ensured that readers "will find this book intellectually rich and practically oriented" as they hoped. With this stimulating book in hand, it should be easier to convince facilitators, teachers, and principles that staff development for cooperative learning is a thoughtful and systematic process, based on first-hand experience and research. It also convinced me that staff developers of cooperative learning are very near fulfilling Forest's definition of a community (page 292).