Cooperative Education Concept: Its Advantages and Disadvantages
Education is crucial for both individuals and society as a whole because it is the best way to improve one's cognitive capabilities, way of thinking, and ability to make wise decisions. Additionally, it boosts self-confidence, which later opens up excellent job opportunities and brings wonderful life benefits.
Since education is the cornerstone of advancement in various fields, including the economy, society, and others, its positive impact extends to the entire society. The only difference between developed and underdeveloped societies is their education percentage.
Education remained one of the least developed fields throughout the ages, despite the developments in other fields. Instead of relying solely on the teacher, as is typical in traditional education, numerous modern educational approaches have emerged in recent years. The majority of these approaches involve the learner in the educational process.
Play-based education is a crucial component of contemporary education and is especially effective with young children in kindergarten. Project-based education is also a good option for undergraduate students, while cooperative education works well for all ages. As a result, in the following article, we will describe its concept, advantages, and disadvantages.
Cooperative Education Concept
Cooperative education is a variety of activities whose implementation depends on the involvement of students in work and application. Students are divided into several groups, and each group forms a team made up of approximately 3-6 students, depending on the size of the class, at varying levels (high, medium, and weak). This is so that they can converse and share experiences and information, ultimately helping each other.
The group members feel the need for cooperation because the failure of one of them has negative effects on the entire team and makes them accountable to the teacher, which results in the achievement of the educational material's desired goals. Vice versa, when the required activity is implemented successfully, the entire team is rewarded in the way designated by the teacher, as cooperative education follows the principle "Together, we can either succeed or fail."
The Teacher's Role in Cooperative Education
The teacher's role is to organize the educational environment by selecting the appropriate lessons for cooperative education, setting up the tables, choosing the students for each team so that they are diverse, and assigning each student a specific role, such as leader, decision-maker, summarizer, or encourager. During the lesson, the teacher explains the objectives that will be achieved and identifies the necessary sources and instructions for the work.
Along with observing the groups, discussing them, and providing feedback, it is also important to keep track of how they work and their participation and bring information closer to their minds. They must also keep notes on how each group and each student perform in order to compare the results with those from previous lessons and realize how much each member of the group has improved and developed their mental abilities over what they were previously.
Cooperative Education Benefits and Advantages
The concept of cooperative education encompasses more than just putting students in groups, assigning them tasks to complete, and having them work together to complete the tasks. Instead, it is a modern educational approach that has many advantages, especially for learners. The following are its most notable advantages:
1. Getting Rid of Old Education Approaches Burdens
Sometimes the teacher takes on the authoritarian role, and the entire mission falls upon them. Cooperative learning seeks to enhance both the learner's and teacher's roles in the educational process.
2. Fostering a Cooperative Attitude Among Students
And avoiding the selfishness that causes some students to withhold information from their peers, as this approach forces everyone to share all of their experiences with the group, which raises the academic level of students. Each of them gains new experiences as a result of their cooperation, and they all learn from one another. Cooperative education then offers opportunities to ensure the success of all learners.
3. Unleashing Students' Dormant Mental Potential
This approach encourages students to work harder and use their intelligence to answer the questions given to the group with the hope of receiving special marks or rewards, which serve to incite healthy competition among the teams.
4. Cooperative Education Improves Students' Ability to Engage in Discussion, Debate, and Opinion Expression
As a result, it boosts the learner's self-confidence and helps the student get used to hearing criticism based on arguments and evidence. This is essential to developing a personality that can later face life with more awareness and be able to fit into the social life that is thrust upon it.
5. Helping the Learner Understand the Lesson Well
As a result, they retain the knowledge for a long time because there is a big difference between hearing something from a teacher and figuring it out on your own after doing some research, working, making some mistakes, and then trying again to get it right. Also, cooperative education is an approach that improves the learner's capacity for wise decision-making.
6. Encouraging the Learner to Assume Responsibilities
As the reward is not for individual work within the group, the team can only succeed if each member of the team completes their assigned task to the best of their ability.
7. Solving the Teacher's Problem of Dealing with Lazy or Introverted Students
Or even the Hooligan who occasionally ruins both the learning opportunities for their colleagues and themselves.
8. It Is Not Limited to Particular Educational Subjects
This approach can be used in various social, humanitarian, or scientific cognitive fields.
9. Students Learn How to Be Kind to Others
By paying attention to the speaker's viewpoint, respecting opposing opinions, and responding politely and directly without using flattery or lies.
10. Motivate the Student to Learn
Cooperative education, as opposed to traditional teaching, which can occasionally be boring, provides the learner with information mixed with enjoyment, suspense, and entertainment. Who among us does not get tired of sitting and listening to the teacher explain a subject after an hour? even if it is a very popular subject?
Cooperative Education Disadvantages
Despite the many advantages of cooperative education that make it an effective approach for transferring and preserving information, it has disadvantages that frequently prevent its use. We mention the following among them:
1. Learners' Evaluation is Unfair
In the cooperative education approach, the entire team gets the same grade. We cannot deny the level of resentment felt by diligent students if they are not recognized and distinguished from the other students because, as we previously stated, the team is made up of students at various levels, and it is unfair to give the same grade to both an excellent and a weak student.
The majority of us have experienced a time when we realized the value of our hard work after receiving recognition, whether in the form of words or a high grade. You can understand the disappointment of a diligent student when they receive the same grade as a student who does not show the same interest as them.
2. A Longer Time Period to Explain the Lessons
In the traditional approach, the teacher prepares the lesson in advance to be able to explain it in a way that helps the students remember the information. However, cooperative education requires the teacher to follow multiple prior procedures to explain the lesson, procedures they perform during the lesson, and procedures after completion as well. which makes the time period required to finish a course longer.
3. The Teacher Must Continuously Supervise The Teams' Work Progress
The implementation of cooperative education is more challenging for teachers than traditional education because the teacher may not be able to manage all teams alone, and it is difficult to have several teachers for the supervision task.
4. One Learner May Not Accept Their Teammate’s Opinion
This may cause a dispute that impedes both the performance of the required activity and the progression of the lesson. Sometimes disputes may arise between two teams as a result of the competition to reach the desired results in the hope of obtaining rewards.
5. The Team May Rely on Just Two or Three Students to Complete the Required Task If It Has a Large Number of Students
This might not be due to indifference, laziness, or unwillingness to learn, but rather because the other team members lack an effective role, so they can only observe what is going on. Therefore, even if they receive high grades, they will not benefit from cooperative education as much as they would like.
In Cooperative Education, Specific Requirements to Complete the Activities May Be Needed But Are Hard to Get Due to Their High Cost.
In Conclusion
Cooperative education is a teaching model that relies on participation and cooperation among learners, as information is extracted through discussion, dialogue, and group work to solve problems, which contributes to creating an atmosphere of cooperation among learners. Also, it enhances the student's self-confidence as a result of raising their ability to express opinions and dialogue and improving their ability to communicate with others and be kind to them, away from selfishness or immoral competition.
Cooperative education fosters a fun environment that encourages learning while also making it easier for students to access information and retain it for longer periods of time. It also makes it easier for teachers to deal with shy or lazy students. However, there are some disadvantages, including the lack of fairness in student evaluations and the requirement for more time, resources, and effort on the part of the teacher in order to be able to effectively supervise and control the groups.