CHAPTER 1: My Personal and Professional Involvement with Cooperative Learning

In the 1960s, several educational researchers and psychologists sought ways to actively engage students of all ages in learning by what became known as cooperative learning (CL). Since then, this approach has grown to be an umbrella pedagogy that covers a diversified body of methods, models, and instructional procedures with increasingly diverse applications. The many ways of organizing a CL classroom raise the question of what they have in common. Brody and Davidson (1998) offer a succinct and helpful definition:

This definition integrates the central elements of the main theories that contribute to making CL what it is today. CL was never a uniform, homogenous approach to teaching and learning; it was born of several “parents” who nurtured it with complementary educational, psychological, sociological, and motivational theories. Together, these theories provide a powerful rationale as to why CL successfully promotes academic and social skills and contributes to meaningful learning. Prominent pioneers of the theories and practice are John Dewey, Morton Deutsch, David Johnson and Roger Johnson, Shlomo Sharan, Robert Slavin, Elizabeth Cohen, and Spencer Kagan (Sharan, 2015). Researchers continue to enrich our understanding of how the various theoretical and practical elements contribute to the mosaic that is the CL pedagogy of today. Researchers and practitioners also continue to contribute to the design and development of classroom and school action plans that include the seminal elements of CL in all subjects and at all levels.