Please note this workshop has been postponed. View our full calendar of professional learning opportunities for other available courses.

Explore the essential elements of effective group work to promote participation, accountability and fair outcomes for students.

Co-operative learning improves information acquisition and retention, higher level thinking skills, interpersonal and communication skills, and the ability to operate in a multi-cultural work environment.

The course will include facilitated discussion, individual and group tasks, personal and group reflection.

Course outline

This course takes place online over three weeks and includes three one-hour, online Zoom sessions. In total, this course should take an average of 10 hours of learning.

Topics covered

Co-operative learning is a teaching and learning technique in which groups of students work on structured tasks under conditions that meet five criteria:

• positive interdependence
• individual accountability
• promotive interaction
• appropriate use of small group skills
• regular monitoring.

We will also address the issues of appropriate assessment design, assessment methods and effective monitoring of groups to promote participation, accountability and fairer outcomes for students.

Participants will have access to useful co-operative learning resources.

Learning outcomes

At the end of this course participants will have:

• discussed the essential elements of co-operative learning
• completed a range of practical co-operative learning activities to use in tertiary teaching and learning environments
• understood effective assessment design and assessment methods for formal groupwork
• addressed issues to effectively monitor groups to promote participation, accountability and fairer outcomes.

Who this course for?

Practitioners in the tertiary education sector who are working with student groups and those who wish to increase learner engagement through the use of co-operative learning activities.

About the facilitator

Jill Clark

Jill Clark, Senior Academic Advisor (Teaching Innovation and Research) at Te Pukenga Whitireia and Wellington Institute of Technology, has been involved in research into cooperative learning (group work) in the diverse New Zealand tertiary environment for the past eighteen years. Jill has presented numerous workshops and conference papers on Cooperative Learning and has published at national and international level.

Jill was on the Executive Board of the International Association for the Study of Cooperation in Education (IASCE), the international organisation for educators who research and practise cooperative learning. She is currently involved in organising and facilitating strands on Cooperative Learning at international conferences for NICLEE - the Global Network for Cooperative Learning.

Please read these Terms and Conditions before you register.