Cooperative learning can be very beneficial when used to ensure each person has a responsibility and can then share the learned information with a larger group. Creating groups to become “experts” on one tribe before presenting to the class allowed for everyone to learn much more material in a shorter amount of time. Not only did this assignment help increase my knowledge of how cooperative learning works in a classroom setting by allowing me to be a part of it, it also increased and refreshed my knowledge of Native American tribes.
Previous to this assignment, my knowledge of Native American Tribes consisted of what small trivia facts I could recall from school; I would not have been able to teach a lesson without going through different resources as was done for this assignment. The resources presented for our use provided ample information about the tribes being researched, in my case the Lakota, and provided information that prompted further exploration of what was stated. Further, because The assignment was not to simply read articles, but instead to then take the information and reformat it into a presentation that highlights important information, the knowledge was further embedded in my mind because I was actively working with it. Because I needed to present the information to the class, it was important for me to be familiar with what I would be saying. This meant that the knowledge learned and retained was more than being able to read a few sentences off of the slides; the wording on the slides were meant to be prompts that would engage what I learned while researching the Lakota tribe for me to then teach to my classmates.
In teaching about the Lakota tribe to the class, as well as observing my classmates teach on their tribes, I was able to reflect and think about how this would be taught to elementary students. The cooperative learning model would work very well with students of all grades, because everyone has responsibilities which ensures an equal sharing of work. By splitting up the tribes to different groups, becoming an “expert” becomes much more manageable and would allow students to focus on perfecting their information and knowledge on one tribe, rather than rushing and trying to know something about everything right away. This assignment also helped me understand more concretely how to teach geography. Not only would this assignment require student to identify where their tribe lived, but also to look at how that affected the people of the tribe. This way, the students are learning locations but also the relationship between an area’s geography and how people learned to adapt to their environment.
While this assignment could easily be used with a wide range of grades, there are different changes and adaptations that could be made to make it best fit different grade levels. For example, using New York State social studies framework standard 2.5b, “the location of physical features and natural resources often affects where people settle and may affect how those people sustain themselves,” second grader students could be asked to focus on how the geography affected the way their assigned tribe lived. They would be asked to identify the food and natural resources the Native Americans relied on based on their geography. For fifth grade students, according to standard 5.4a which states “physical maps reflect the varied climate zones, landforms, bodies of water, and natural resources of the Western Hemisphere,” students can be asked to look at a map of different regions where Native Americans resided and infer which natural resources would have influences the way they lived and sustained themselves. Students could also be asked to, after learning about different Native American Tribes, infer which tribes may have resided in the same or similar regions, as is aligned with standard 5.4b, “the Western Hemisphere can be divided into regions. Regions are areas that share common, identifiable characteristics such as physical, political, economic, or cultural features.” These inferences require a higher level of thinking as well as require the students to be able to make generalizations about the information learned and so would be more fitting to use with older students. Another adaptation that would need to be made would be the reading level of resources provided to students. These resources could be more specifically adapted to the student working on a certain tribe, if some students read below grade level. This would ensure that one or two members would not be doing all of the reading and researching.
(Rubric)
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