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In this chapter, I describe my use of cooperative learning in the mid-1990s when I was teaching English to students in their final year at a secondary school in Singapore. I will first discuss how I came to learn about cooperative learning. Then, I will illustrate how I set up the classroom for cooperative learning and how I used it in the teaching of three language skills: writing, reading, and oral skills in a Normal Academic class. In the chapter's final section, I will explain how the teachers at my school cooperated with each other to make our work easier and more successful. In each of these sections of the chapter, I will also be talking about how principles that I learned from the cooperative learning literature provided me the framework I had been missing in my previous use of group activities. [This article is chapter 7 in: S. G. McCafferty, G. M. Jacobs, & Iddings, C. (Eds.), "Cooperative learning and second language teaching" (pp. 113-133). New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.]

It was scary at first. Just getting P1 and 2 students to follow basic instructions is hard enough; trying to get them to work together in groups seemed like asking for extra trouble. But, a dash or two of trouble adds a bit of spice to a veteran teacher's life; so the four of us teachers at Mayflower Primary School--a neighbourhood school in Ang Mo Kio--decided to take up the challenge when our principal, Ms Ngeow Ah Cheng, asked if we'd like to join a Learning Circle to help us use cooperative learning with our lower primary students. This article recounts our odyssey. We begin with a little background on cooperative learning and Learning Circles. Cooperative learning (CL) can be defined as concepts and strategies for helping students work well with one another. In other words, CL is a lot more than just telling students to "work together". Learning Circles (LC) are a form of teacher-directed professional development. Through LCs, we teachers work together to: reflect on the how, what, and why of our teaching; identify and solve problems in our teaching; and share our insights with fellow professionals. So, you could say that LCs are a form of CL among teachers, but LCs don't have to be about CL. Other LCs in Singapore deal with issues such as helping underachievers, environmental education, and teaching thinking. In Singapore, MOE's Teachers' Network is a prime breeding ground for LCs. They supplied us with a friendly facilitator, Sheila, and a not-so-friendly, but charming nonetheless, resource person, George.