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COLLABORATIVE TRAINING AS A FACTOR OF SUCCESS IN TRAINING ACTIVITIES OF PRIMARY SCHOOL CHILDREN
A. A. Khalikov R. M. Sadykov
This article describes the principles of cooperative learning, the effect of cooperative learning on development of the child's personality, and success in the educational activities of primary school children. It also shows the value of collective assessment of knowledge and skills of learners in cooperative learning.
Key words: cooperative learning, activation of learners, learning efficiency, success, creativity, communication skills.
Our studies have shown that different organization of the educational process and changes in educational methods and methods for organization of educational activities can give different properties to primary school children’s thinking. Voluntary attention is developed together with other functions, firstly, through training motivation and a feeling of responsibility for the success of the training activities.
A review of the training practice shows that the success of a lesson at the primary school depends first on all on the teacher’s ability to develop conditions and arrange a situation of collaboration. When we speak of training and educational collaboration, we should be aware that there are two factors: interaction of the teacher and student within the joint training activity, and interaction between teachers within the system of inter-subject relations. Practice shows that joint training is not only easier and more interesting, but also more effective. Joint training rather than just doing something together is the essence of this process. The teacher can apply an innovative approach to his (her) students, but only provided that the main principles of collaborative training are met. Let us list them: (1) teams of students are formed prior to the lesson taking into account the children’s psychological compatibility. Each team must include a good, a mediocre and a poor student of both sexes. If the team is working successfully on several lessons, there is no need to change its composition. If they fail to work successfully, the composition can be changed for each new lesson; (2) each team is given one task, but each member must be given his/her personal role (the roles are usually allotted by the students themselves but the teacher may give advice in some cases); (3) the work of the whole team rather than of a single student is assessed (i.e. the score is applied to the whole team); the teacher assesses the efforts rather than the knowledge of the students (nobody would wish to work with a poor student and he/she would suffer complexes if the real results were assessed); (4) the teacher himself chooses the student who accounts for the task. In some cases this could be a poor student. If the poor student can formulate the results of joint work, and answer questions from another group, then the purpose is achieved, since the purpose of any task is retention of materials by each member of the group.
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So why does collaborative training attract teachers? The answer to this question follows from the identified peculiarities of communication of primary school children with each other as compared to communication with adults. The matter is that the ways of activities mastered together with adults are reproduced by him together with his fellow pupils within cognitive, training, play, and other activities, where there is no regulated interaction, and the school child constructs his/her behavior based on his/her own aspirations and capacities. It is important to understand that the children’s environment impacts development of the child’s personality by the essence of interactions between members, rather than by the fact of gathering them. Irrespectively of the subject, class training can be constructed in such a way that students (a) compete with each other for the right to be called the best; (b) obtain knowledge independently of one another, and set their own goals, moving towards them at their own speed; (c) work by gathering in small teams.
If students have to compete for scores, they work against each other, aspiring for a goal available only to a few persons (or even a single person). However, competition has a considerable fault: the student’s personal success is opposed to the failures of his (her) fellow students. The student works a lot to advance, or becomes negligent as he/she is not sure of his/her ability to win. When students work individually, they aspire to achieve their own goals, and don’t care what their fellow student do. Only their own efforts and successes are important for them; successes and failures of their fellows do not matter to them. It is important that a dual task is set before the team: first, achieving a cognitive creative goal, and second, the social or rather social and psychological one, that is realization of a certain culture of communication. The teacher controls not only the success in fulfilling tasks by the students, but also the nature of their interaction between each other and mutual assistance.
Collaboration is the joint work of several persons aimed at achieving common goals. While working in a team, the person has to think not only of his own interests, but also of the interests of his fellows. Therefore, collaborative training forms conditions for positive interaction between students in the process of achievement of a common goal: each person understands that he can succeed (i.e. master certain knowledge) only provided that the other team members achieve their goals. Therefore, for collaborative training, special attention is paid to the success and collective goals of the whole team, which can only be achieved by the independent efforts of each member in continuous collaboration with his fellows during the work on the subject (issue, question) under consideration. The objective of each student is not only to do something together, but to learn something together, and for each student to master the required knowledge and formulate the required skills. It is also important for the team to know the success of each student, i.e. the team must be interested in mastering the training material by each member. The pedagogy of collaboration has a single goal, which is to give the child the confidence that he/she will succeed, to teach him/her to learn, to prevent him/her from falling behind and noticing his/her weakness.
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translastions Bureas
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