Implementing Cooperative Learning with Secondary School Students

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.]