That´s the difference!

Do you remember my post "Together we reach the goal!" talking about "Teach-okay"
I said something about..... 

Well let´s find out a bit more about it.

Children learn best when they are involved, investigating, do and discover things for themself. 

To help them on this, we can make a base team. 

But, how?

Distribute the students in the class into three categories:
Any suggstions?

                           Well this is a possibility:

• Students willing to motivate their teammates.
• Students with the most need of assistance. 
• Intermediate Students.

Now we need to form the base team, what I do is sit the children in teams of four, where we will choose one student able to help others, another student that is in need of receiving assistance and two intermediate students.

This is how it looks:

This distribution is effective for work in shoulder pairs (students sitting one next to the other, shoulder to shoulder) and hand pairs (students sitting facing each other). 

Very easy to work out “Teach – okay!”

For a group team, it is necessary to assign roles and functions within the teams. It helps on individual responsibility, positive interaction and equitable sharing of the learning process. 

The roll within the team are:

The Coordinator will verifies understanding and records the activity organizing work and time.
The Secretary is responsible for the equipment needs and records the decisions and opinions.
The Head of silence and of material, maintains the appropriate tone of voice to avoid disturbing others; directs members’ turn to speak and collects all materials that may need to be turn in.
The Spokesperson will encourage all members to participate equally; reinforces well-done job and the successes of the team. 

How to organise the cooperative classroom?

It is necessary to establish some routines teaching students to mantain an appropriate tone of voice in order to control the ambient noice of the class. Assigning a role of the head of silence may be very useful but WBT has helped me on this with the Beat the clock!!!! This technique will keep track of how long they keep the correct noise for team work. The goal is for students to go for 20 minutes without the negative noise tone. Each time they get off-task I will mark how long the good tone noise lasted and reset the clock. Students will try to improve upon their times.

Establishing an attention signal where students stop working and remain silent when it is used by the teacher and WBT gaves the "Class boom!" All I do is say "Class Boom!" and I have them all responding "Yes boom!", sitting with their hand fold and looking at me ready for me to give them more explanation or to resolve any questions or problem that concerns to the whole cass.

And of course organizing the classroom for cooperative work and giving out their roll will all make it possible to create the atmospher for cooperative learning.