Enhancing Cooperating Learning with Negotiated Activities"

 
For six years I have taught in Saudi Arabian secondary schools for more than six years. During that time, while using cooperative learning strategies to encourage my students to share and discuss a range of ideas, I have observed that students’ knowledge seems to reach new levels every day while they are interacting and sharing their experiences with each other. Thinking about this occurrence, I deduced that attending school and interacting with others is somehow linked to better comprehension and wider knowledge.

However, my deduction is not enough to substantiate my hypothesis that interacting and sharing leads to better understanding thus I explored existing theory about how people learn. Through this exploration, I have found that knowledge that is indeed possible for people to gradually construct knowledge through interaction and by becoming each other’s students in the process. In fact, according to Fraser & Getswicki (2001) referring to the works of Schon (1983), taking a reflective stand toward each other’s constructs and by recognizing the effect of each other’s perceptions can lead to a better understanding than if they simply listened to the teacher or read and copied text.

The literature also identifies constructivism as a process of developing knowledge and understanding (Beck & Kosnik 2006; Torp & Sage 2002; Edwards et al. 1998) that challenge traditional ways of teaching. In my experience in using Cooperative Learning for Arabic Literature classes in the secondary school of Princess Mohammed Bin Saud Al Kabeer, I observed the student’s learning development progress. I noticed that cooperative learning greatly contributes to the enrichment of student’s knowledge and coordination between them.

However, although cooperative learning is an effective learning process and has many useful features, it does not allow students to make decisions for themselves particularly on things they specifically want to learn.