Of the many things that have been studied in higher education, cooperative learning may be the most studied, and it may be the teaching technique most strongly associated with gains in learning. It promotes greater effort by students to achieve, increased time on task, better learning and higher-level reasoning, better relationships, and even better psychological health. (See the report at this link.) At the same time, it may not seem to work in some law teachers’ classrooms. Some professors use the best-known cooperative learning technique, think-pair-share, so often that their teaching becomes stale. In this post, I will offer suggestions for increasing the likelihood that the small group sessions in your classes are productive, and, next week, I will explain how to use four commonly used small group structures.

Keys to Small Group Sessions

Individual Accountability. Both the professor and the group members must hold each other responsible for being prepared and for learning. In other words, each student must be assessed for their contributions (by their peers) and by the professor for learning.

Positive Interdependence. All the students in the group must work to ensure that all the other members of the group learn the assigned material. Group members must understand that each group member’s efforts are indispensable. Law teachers can facilitate positive interdependence by:

• Setting group learning goals and rewarding group success (such as by providing a grade bonus if all members of a group achieve a stated level), 
• Distributing resources within each group such that everyone in the group needs something from every other member of the group,  
• Assigning each student a role (leader, recorder, checker of understanding, questioner/skeptic, speaker to the class as a whole) within the group (in addition to their responsibility for contributing to the group discussion), or 
• Structuring group projects so that each student’s contribution is dependent on a prior student successfully completing her portion of the project.

Communication skills. A third requirement is closely tied to the first two. To achieve the first two requirements, students need to encourage each other to work hard and do well, to celebrate each other’s successes, to challenge each other to do better, to help each other feel comfortable making mistakes, to be willing to provide each other both positive and critical feedback, and to act in trustworthy and trusting ways. To achieve this condition, professors need to communicate effectively about group communication expectations and to walk around the classroom during cooperative learning exercises, listening carefully, intervening when necessary, and reinforcing optimal student interactions.

Three Other Important Practices

1. Limit group size to 3-5 students per group.  Groups larger than 5 often splinter into two groups. Two-person groups often lack diversity of perspective.
2. Tightly control each phase of the group process. Give students specific goals to achieve and specific time limits for each part of the task.
3. Require preparation in advance, just as you would for a Socratic class.