Page 229 - DEDU505_TEACHER_EDUCATION_ENGLISH

Unit 24: Meaning, Nature and Strategies of Group Controlled Instructions

students. They have the freedom to explore their ideas, discuss with their friends and sharpen Notes
their thinking and actions, get help and provide support to others. Thus cooperative learning
is quite advantageous to students. The main advantages of cooperative learning are as
follows:
• Students are often able to translate the teacher's language into their own language atld
enrich their understanding.
• Students learn by actually participating in the teaching-learning process. The students
have to organise their thoughts to explain ideas to their mates. They engage themselves
in cognitive elaboration that greatly enhances theiu understanding.
• Students can provide individual attention to and get assistence from one another. As they
can freely seek assistance from fellow students in learning, their achievement will be much
higher.

Cooperative learning generates more intrinsic motivation than does individualised
learning.

(iii) Group Investigation: At the school stage certain topics are such which raise doubts and
questions in the minds of the students and for those the do not find answers in the textbooks.
To answer such questions requires investigation phenomenon. Problerns/questions whose
answers are not readily available require investigation. Some of the problems are such that
no individual student can investigate these by himself. It is, therefore, desirable to carry out
group investigation in such a situation. The process in which a group of students selects
problems/questions and tries to fmd out their solutions collectively in a scientific manner
is called group investigation.
Organising a group investigation: In order to take up group investigation as an instructional
activity at the shml stage and to make it successful your guidance to students is very much
essential. Do you know how a group investigation should be carried out? It is necessary for
you, as a teacher, to know what are the different phases through which group investigation
proceeds. A class engaged in a group investigation will through the following phases:
• Selection of problem: You may indicate some example problems and guide the groups to
select a suitable problem for investigation.
• Cooperative planning: The members of the group will plan their wok regardin& collection
of evidence, sources of evidence, and allocation of work among members. They should
also estimate the time to be devoted to investigation work. Besides collecting data from
various soltrces, the group should also plan about h p data will be analysed and who will
do the analysis. They should also decide the way the report on the investigation will be
prepared. For each activity, time must be estimated.
• Implementation: Work should be started according to the plan. Every member should try
hisher best to complete the activities within the stipulated time. Evidence from all the
sources and areas should be collected.
• Analysis and synthesis: The collected evidence should be analysed and synthesised logically
in order to arrive at valid results.
• Preparation of report and presentation: A brief report of the wok done should be prepared by
each group. The report should include information about how the work was done and
what findings were arrived at The report should not be of more than a few pages. It
should not be a very technical report but just a write-up which should be presented by the
coordinator of each group.
• Evaluation: You should evaluate the wark of each team on the basis of your of the group's
way of solving the problem. You should judge, whether art adequate and valid and
solutions arrived at are logical and based on facts. You should provide feedback to the
group.

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