Cooperative Learning in Lithuania

Egle Pranckuniene

I would not be surprised to find that not all the readers of the IASCE Newsletter know where Lithuania is. It is a little country near the Baltic Sea, neighbouring Latvia and Estonia. Lithuania is one of the accession countries to European Union, so it is going through very dynamic reforms, including education reform.

Education reform is oriented towards democratisation of schools and classrooms, introduction of a student-centred approach, decentralised curriculum and active learning methods. If one reads the educational policy documents, one finds a set of very progressive and up-to-date statements. But if you enter an ordinary school, especially in a large city, usually you will find teacher-centred classrooms, with very few episodes of student interaction and other forms of active involvement.

Yet visiting another school, you can observe a “boiling” school life, with busy, interested students involved in group investigations, and teachers who are not depressed, but proud of their students and school. As you can see, schools in Lithuania vary greatly in their readiness to implement the new ideas. Many of them are tired of non-stop reforms; they need much more support and care. The others are far ahead of the state reforms; they want to move much more rapidly. Schools are extremely diverse – this is the most obvious result of the reform, whereas schools used to be very similar in Soviet times.

On the bright side, our educators use the term co-operative learning (CL) very frequently. It is being used in our policy documents, as well. Many teachers think that it is something very simple, what they are doing in their classrooms every day. I think that this is a very familiar situation to all teacher trainers who are trying to disseminate the ideas of CL.

We at the non-profit Centre for School Improvement went down a similar path ourselves. This is our story. We organize in-service training courses for teachers and school teams, provide consulting for schools, organize research, evaluate and document school change, facilitate co-operation and collaboration between Lithuanian and foreign educators and implement many different educational projects. A few years ago, we became disseminators of CL ideas in Lithuania.

However, we were not initially impressed with CL. In 1995, my colleague Marina Vildziuniene and I participated in a big educational conference where one of the workshops was devoted to co-operative learning. To be frank, our first impression was that it was a superficial, purely American product, which could not be adapted to our classrooms. Later, we had more opportunities to learn about co-operative learning: we were reading, participating in many different trainings, starting to use the elements of CL in our programs and step-by-step, after several years, we became real “fans” of co-operative learning.

Firstly, we organized several workshops for the teacher trainers, who are associated with our Centre. Our “guru” was Diane Fyfe, Director General of the Western Quebec School Board. We became very close friends and partners, and her professional support was invaluable. Diane came to the workshops during her holidays, provided us with a lot of materials, and consulted with us a lot on the development of the program.      

Inspired by Diane, we developed a special program on CL, which is offered to schools. We translated it to Lithuanian and published a well-known book by B. Bennet, C.Rolheiser and L.Stevahn “Cooperative Learning: Where Heart Meets Mind”.  We prepared a group of eight trainers who are delivering CL workshops at schools. All these trainers are active users of CL in their classrooms or teacher training events.

In our Centre, we are disseminating the idea of school-based teachers’ professional development. That means that we are coming to a school and working with all the teachers at that school, allocating special time for them to plan the implementation of the new ideas. Later, schools can receive additional professional support, if they need it. We use this approach for CL, as well as other innovations, and it is quite successful. 

Compared to other programs offered by our Centre, CL is not very popular. This is not surprising, because if a school wants to implement CL widely, it has to be ready for that: it should have flexible organizational structures, skilled teachers and a suitable classroom environment. The school should be ready to take risks and not to be in a hurry to achieve good results. Very few schools are ready for that. But there are around ten schools which are using CL systematically and achieving very good results.

Until recently, we did not have a school network or any other bigger project. Instead, our work was principally based on initiatives of individual teachers and schools. But now a big national Education Improvement program is being launched, which has a long-term and complex training component for school teams. The training program is based on CL and will help schools to become more student-centred. Two people who are very well-known to the readers of the IASCE Newsletter are helping us with this program: Pasi Sahlberg and Yael Sharan. Their help is extremely valuable to us. The program is very ambitious, it includes many different components, but we believe that cooperative learning philosophy will help Lithuanian schools to become better for their students. Now, we are at the very beginning. In the future, we will continue to share with you our experiences.        

Egle Pranckuniene
Director, Centre for School Improvement
Klaipedos 6 – 406, 2000 Vilnius
Lithuania
phone: 370 5 212 71 83
fax: 370 5 212 71 73
email: egle@osf.lt

Purchase the Winter 2002 (41:1) issue of Theory Into Practice, "Promoting Thinking Through Peer Learning," guest edited by Angela O'Donnell for $12.00 and get the Spring 1999 (38:2) issue, "Building Community Through Cooperative Learning," guest edited by Margarita Calderon and Robert Slavin for $6.00 (a 50% discount) plus shipping. For ordering information, visit the TIP web site at www.coe.ohio-state.edu/TIP and click on the "Ordering Information" link. And be sure to mention code IASCE702 to receive the discounted price.

Journal of Cooperation and Collaboration in College Teaching Changes Its Title
The Journal of Cooperation and Collaboration in College Teaching has changed its name to the Journal of Student Centered Learning. The focus of the journal is on “encouraging college and university faculty in the search for ways to achieve a focus on learning that is student centered versus teacher centered.” Additional information is available at www.newforums.com/news_jccpage.htm. This webpage may not be active much longer, in which case, please go to the website of the journal’s publisher, New Forums Press: www.newforums.com. One reason for the title change is that the journal under its former name was not attracting sufficient submissions.

Coming Attractions

Read a good book, seen a good website, article, etc. about cooperative learning and related trends in education and life? Heard about a relevant conference or other get-together? If you have this and other information that you would like to share via the IASCE Newsletter, please send it to George Jacobs at gmjacobs@pacific.net.sg. Thank you in advance.