From the Book Shelves

Richards, J. C., & Rodgers, T. S. (2001). Approaches and methods in language teaching (2^nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press. [Chapter on Cooperative Language Learning – pp. 192-203]

A sign of the growing prominence of CL is that CL is the subject of one of the new chapters in the second edition of this major work in the field of second language teaching, originally published in 1986.

The new book describes 16 methods and approaches. The format of most chapters in the book is:

• background on the approach being described
• the theory of language that underlies use of the approach in second language instruction
• the theory of learning underlying the approach
• objectives
• syllabus
• typical learning and teaching activities
• learner roles
• teacher roles
• roles of instructional materials
• procedures (how a typical lesson might be conducted)

As to the theory of language underlying CL, the authors list five premises that support the view that interaction promotes language learning.

• Premise 1 – communication is the main purpose of language
• Premise 2 – conversation constitutes a key human activity
• Premise 3 – conversation follows certain cooperative maxims
• Premise 4 – in the native language, these maxims are learned via casual, everyday conversation
• Premise 5 – interaction during cooperatively structured activities helps students understand and utilize these maxims.

Blanchard, K., Bowles, S., Carew, D., & Parisi-Carew, E. (2001). High five! The magic of working together. New York: William Morrow.

Last week, I was in the local public library looking for books on cooperation in the workplace, as someone had asked me to consider doing a workshop on teams and work relationships for the entire staff of an educational institution (including non-teachers). Near one of the books I was looking for was a book with a title that grabbed my attention: High five! The magic of working together. The book also boasted of an introduction by Spencer Johnson, author of Who Moved My Cheese? To my knowledge, Spencer Johnson is no relation to the Johnsons of cooperative learning fame, but I had read Who Moved My Cheese? (which is not about groups) last year on the advice of a principal who said that it might help me understand how some teachers feel when innovations, such as cooperative learning, are introduced. The book is a parable about how various mice react when their familiar routine for obtaining cheese is disturbed.

High Five! is also a parable. It tells the story of a high-level corporate executive, Alan Foster, who is fired because although he’s an excellent worker, he’s not a team player. As the company president explains to Foster (p. 5):

You do great on your own, but the rest of your team isn’t doing very well. I need people who can work together for our goals. … Sure, you’d score less, but the team would score a whole lot more. As president, I have to be concerned with maximizing the contributions of everyone. Fact is, Alan, you’re costing us money.

Now that he’s unemployed, Foster joins the coaching staff of his ten-year-old son’s ice hockey team. The team does poorly, in part because they don’t play as a team. The hero of the story is an 85-year-old retired teacher, Weatherby, who comes in and teaches the boys and their coaches about why and how to work together. I don’t know much about literature, but I found it to be an enjoyable story. And, although the book, predictably, has a happy ending, it doesn’t end exactly as I guessed at the beginning.

So, what are the lessons the book teaches about collaboration? The book’s four main points to remember about building high-performing teams are summarized in the acronym PUCK (pp. 172-174). (A puck is the hard rubber disk that ice hockey players try to hit into the goal.) P stands for "providing a clear purpose with values and goals." This gives people a rationale for putting team before self and gives the team a clear purpose and direction. U stands for "understanding and developing skills—continuously building individual skills." These heightened individual skills raise the collective skill level of the entire team. Sports teams often spend time developing these skills, but teams at work (and school) often seem too focused on the product to spend time building skills.

C stands for "creating team power." This involves understanding that "none of us is as smart as all of us" and highlights the synergy achieved from collaboration. As the teacher-hero of the book, Weatherby, explains, once she has realized the power of none of us is as smart as all of us, "I’ve gone from being a relatively powerless individual to being part of something far more powerful, productive, and successful than I could be on my own. It all hangs on ten short words. Only three of them have more than two letters" (p. 60).

The final letter in the PUCK acronym is K which stands for "keeping the accent on the positive … [via] repeated reward and recognition." This is something educators have sometimes been advised to do, to strive to catch our students being good and then give positive reinforcement. (Some educators may be troubled by the behaviorist tone of this view and the analogy the authors make between education of humans and the training of other animals to perform tricks in shows. However, the need for feedback is also acknowledged from a cognitivist perspective.)

That caveat aside, other ideas in the book that CL practitioners may resonate with include:

As someone who writes articles and books in collaboration with others, I found the book’s Afterword, where the authors talk about the process of writing their book, to be particularly interesting. After declaring that the book is a much better one than any of the four of them could have written alone, they talk about some of the down side of collaboration (pp. 183-184):

Where there is team magic, there may also be personal frustration or even pain. … If you’re going to be part of a High Five team, you have to be willing to accept some losses. Fight for your ideas certainly. Try to convince others. But if they can’t or won’t buy in to your thinking, it’s time to take a deep breath and let go. … Learning to let go, to put the team’s will first, is an empowering experience that leads to the most wonderful of all experiences: being a member of a high-performing, gung-ho, High Five team. I find that many people in education respond positively when I use the existence of groups at the workplace as a rationale for groups at school. This book – and the authors have a couple others on the same topic that I haven’t read (Gung-ho and The One-Minute Manager Builds High Performing Teams) – will help me do this.

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