July 2007, Page 5

Cooperative Learning Per Tutti (Cooperative Learning for All):
Cooperative Learning in Italy

Yael Sharan, yaelshar@zahav.net.il, and Annavaleria Guazzieri, annavaleria.guazzieri@tin.it

What do you think of when you hear names like Lake Garda, Verona, Trento, Rome, and Turin? Rich histories, beautiful buildings and landscapes, elegant cafes? Now you can add involvement in Cooperative Learning. In September 2006, the lovely resort town of Bardolino, on the eastern shore of Lake Garda, hosted a national convention on cooperative learning. As reported in the IASCE newsletter issue of October of that year, the conference was co-hosted by the Prof Agostino Portera, head of the Department of Intercultural Studies at the University of Verona, and was co-chaired by Prof Mario Comoglio, of the Salesian University in Rome. The main focus of the conference sessions was the influence of cooperative learning on the development of students' social skills. This was to be the first of a planned series of annual conferences. The design of the conference program and the presentations (see the above newsletter article for details) attested to the strong impact CL has made on education in

Italy

since it was introduced in the 1990s.

The idea of a national convention was the brainchild of the head of Bardolino's school district, Emanuela Antolini. When she came to her post two years earlier, she saw that teachers felt isolated and thought they would benefit from team work and cooperation. She invited Prof Comoglio to train teachers in the Bardolino region. The success of the project was evident in the teachers' work presented at the conference and the enthusiasm they showed for learning more about CL.

Prof Comoglio discovered cooperative learning by chance while studying a different subject in the

United States

. Realizing its benefits, he set about learning it thoroughly and has since devoted himself to training trainers and teachers. He has also authored several books on CL.

While Prof Comoglio was developing CL in Rome and surroundings, a parallel development was taking place in Trento, in northern

Italy

. In 1997, after having studied CL with the Johnsons and with Robert Slavin, Prof Giorgio Chiari (a former IASCE Board member) invited a group of teachers and teacher trainers to participate in a three-year course on cooperative learning methods at the University of Trento, with the support of several regional in-service training centers.

The principal goal of the course was to introduce teachers and trainers to the theoretical underpinnings of cooperative learning, to teach them various CL methods, and to make them aware, as both teachers and citizens, of the value of cooperation. Concurrently, Prof Chiari co-ordinated a research study in schools in the Trentino region and other Italian provinces.

Prof Chiari's studies suggested that although CL methods were not always applied in full, they appeared to be 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.

Many of the teachers who participated in the training course went on to conduct in-service training in cooperative learning methods in their home regions. It was the good fortune of the first author to take part in the training course in Trento as well as to teach in many in-service training courses connected with the project.

Furthermore, as in many other countries, CL has been enthusiastically embraced by Italian teachers of English as a second or foreign language, thanks to the many opportunities for communication and practice it enables.

CL has also become an integral part of educational research at many different university departments, such as the Departments of Anthropology and of Intercultural Education at the University of Turin, where Prof Francesca Gobbo teaches. Prof Gobbo is the head of the Italian team, that includes CESEDI (a teacher services center), who are organizing the international IASCE-IAIE conference, which will take place in January, 2008. At the conference, we will all have an opportunity to learn more about the ways Italian teachers and teacher educators work with CL, how they adapt it to their specific cultural and organizational contexts, and the challenges they face today.