Cooperative Learning in Context
by Evelyn Jacob
Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999 ISBN: 0-7914-4242.
Reviewed by Celeste M. Brody

When Neil Davidson and I prepared for our book on professional development and cooperative learning (Brody & Davidson, 1998), we wanted to find out from the researchers and leaders in the field of cooperative learning what they knew about how teachers were adapting cooperative learning. We learned that there was a growing body of research on how teachers adapted an innovation through existing beliefs and local conditions. We also found, however, that those engaged in the development, dissemination, and use of an instructional innovation pay little attention to the situation or context of the teachers who are learning or applying it. Consequently educators know little about teachers' level of use and fidelity to a simple standard of effective cooperative learning. We even know less about how teachers make sense of the innovation through their experiences and context demands, although many have called for just this kind of research.

Evelyn Jacob's book, Cooperative Learning in Context, is an excellent example of the kind of research that will help to fill this void. Dr. Jacob is an educational anthropologist who spent an academic year with two elementary teachers and their students with the goal of understanding how they use cooperative learning. In the fourth grade mathematics class the teacher used Teams-Games-Tournaments, one of the CL methods developed by Robert Slavin at Johns' Hopkins University. The sixth grade teacher learned through training and then used the Learning Together approach developed by David and Roger Johnson. Both teachers and the researcher evaluated the application of these models as having mixed results in terms of student learning and the potential of CL. Jacob tried not to evaluate the models themselves, but devoted her analysis to applying six contextual aspects (drawn from anthropology) that affect teaching and learning. These six aspects interconnect to influence the innovation in context and the actual teaching and learning that occurs. They are: task structure, psychological and technical tools, interpersonal interactions and social relationships, individual and social means, local cultures and institutions, and larger cultures and institutions.

The strength of the book is in how Jacob illuminates the importance of context for understanding educational innovations. She begins with an excellent review of prior studies of context and educational innovations. She has a good grasp of the range of methods that constitute cooperative learning and avoids making judgments about the ones that the teachers in this study decide to adopt. Her presentation of the two case studies demonstrates in rich detail how the teachers use cooperative learning and how students learned and functioned within cooperative groups. For example, the mathematics teacher found TGT a highly competitive, formulaic method, and philosophically incompatible. But the teacher had no one to consult about the contradictions she experienced between this CL model, her own beliefs and the goals of the curriculum she was trying to carry out. This is all too common a complaint about certain approaches to CL, along with how complex many CL methods really are.

Jacob devotes a chapter to the opportunities second language learners had for acquiring English during cooperative learning classes. This is an important addition to understanding the potential of CL approaches for an increasingly diverse student population.

The last three chapters should be of interest to those who are doing research in teachers' learning and cooperative learning. Jacob compares the case studies and their contributions to the understanding of contextual influences on learning and cognition and then makes some useful suggestions for implementing cooperative learning, including a series of questions that teachers