20110428

What Parents want Teachers to Know: 5. Co-operation

Cooperation: Schools seem bent on fostering a crazy level of independence, when at the office I’m working hard to build cooperative teams where people work with each others’ strengths, assist each other to overcome individual deficiencies, and together advance a common cause.

If you cooperate like this in the class room, schools apply their technical term and say it’s ‘cheating’. But John Sweller (UNSW education researcher) tells us that people learn by seeing things done properly and then, with gradually reduced supports, practicing it themselves. If the teacher is not giving the appropriate support, then, heck, why not seek it from classmates?

If nothing else, this is an indicator that the educational process has let a child down: teacher’s problem, not child’s.

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