Strongly persistent in our Italian school system is an emphasis on verbal learning and frontal lessons, with the teacher as the central focus, telling more than asking. There is little room for enhancing students’ autonomy, responsibility for learning, and co-operation, all of which we deem necessary for the application of learning in real-life social and work settings. Our endeavour to renew the Italian school and education system stems from the urgent need to counter the steady decline in educational standards, and centres on a shift of emphasis from teaching to learning. We felt that co-operative learning strategies would improve the schools, prepare pupils for the needs of today’s world of work and would help them develop appropriate civic attitudes.

Therefore, in 1998, I invited a group of teachers and teacher trainers to participate in a three-year course on co-operative learning methods at the University of Trento in Italy. Among the leading experts on various methods who taught the group were: Jerome Freiberg, Robert Slavin, Yael Sharan, Edythe Holubec, David and Roger Johnson, and Elizabeth Cohen. At the same time, a few participants attended seminars at the Cooperative Learning Center at CRESPAR (Johns Hopkins University), with Robert Slavin; at the Co-operative College of Loughborough, Leicestershire with Alan Wilkins, Sue Jones, and Neil Lane; and at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, with David and Roger Johnson.

The following Italian institutions were partners in the project:

Universita’ Pontificia Salesiana of Rome (Prof. Mario Comoglio); University Of Rome, Faculty of Psychology (Prof. Clotilde Pontecorvo); University Of Trento, Department of Sociology and Social Research; ISRE (Regional Inservice Training Office) of Venice; INECOOP (Istituto Nazionale per l'Educazione Cooperativa) (Pantaleo De Marco, F. Scalvini); and ISSAN (Istituto Studi e Sviluppo Aziende Nonprofit) University of Trento, Faculty of Economics (Carlo Borzaga).

The principal goal of the training course was to introduce teachers and trainers to the theoretical underpinnings of co-operative learning, to teach them the various CL methods, and to make them aware, as both teachers and citizens, of the value of co-operation. We perceive co-operative learning as a theoretically and empirically based group of methods that enhance pupils’ and teachers’: (a) levels of social competence, personal and moral responsibility, and (b) cognitive and meta-cognitive skills.

Concurrently, I co-ordinated a research study in compulsory and post-compulsory schools in the Trentino region and other Italian provinces. All the teachers in the study were participants in the course at the University of Trento who were applying in their classrooms some of the co-operative methods and procedures. A Before/After assessment schedule was administered in 58 experimental classes and 52 control classes to measure affective, social and cognitive components.

Close attention was paid to the design of effective teaching procedures. When we felt that teachers were competent, we recorded lessons on videotape for reflective viewing by the teachers and their pupils. Although CL methods were not always applied in full, they proved to be significantly effective in terms of academic gains in almost all the experimental classes, in particular those given the most resources and whose teachers had the most training. We also studied various aspects of classroom climate, pupil satisfaction, individual and group social skills, achievement, pupils’ self-esteem and other variables. The full report will soon be published.

An additional benefit of the three-year course is that many of the teachers who participated in the training course went on to conduct in-service training courses in co-operative learning methods in their home regions.

Giorgio Chiari is Professor of Methodology and Techniques of Social Research at the University of Trento, Trento, Italy