If Rip Van Winkle were to visit America's schools today, he might be in for at least one great shock. Rip might expect to see a classroom with the teacher at the front, chalk in hand, lecturing, explaining, and questioning, for that has been the prevailing mode of instruction for many decades. Today, however, Rip might see the teacher acting as leader and guide with groups of students working in highly structured learning activities. Rip would not know he was witnessing the emergence of a powerful vehicle for student learning--cooperative learning. He also would not know that principals need additional skills to evaluate and coach teachers who use cooperative learning.
Since the early 1980s, tens of thousands of teachers across the country have adopted cooperative learning (Dishon & O'Leary, 1984). Cooperative learning has tremendous potential for increasing student learning. When compared with teaching strategies that emphasize competitive and individualistic learning, researchers claim cooperative learning is more likely to result in higher student achievement, greater student motivation, and more positive student attitudes toward learning (Johnson & Johnson, 1991;Slavin, 1991). Others report cooperative learning also produces higher level reasoning processes, higher self-esteem, and greater interpersonal competencies than do competitive and individualistic learning (Joyce & Showers, 1988;Joyce, Bennett, & Rolheiser-Bennett, 1990).
This approach to teaching and learning requires strategies that are more complex than teacher-centered instructional approaches. After the teacher has decided that the academic objectives of a specific lesson can best be taught by using cooperative learning, the teacher must make decisions about group size, assignment to groups, the room arrangement for the groups, unique cooperative roles to be assigned to group members, positive interdependence, individual accountability, social skills to be practiced, and processing strategies to be used. The teaching process also requires different strategies. While setting the lesson, the teacher must explain the academic