Working Together

In earlier blogs I have talked about Cooperative learning and today I had my first taste of how my students acted when working together to accomplish a team goal. For my second ISDP I used the teaching strategy "cooperative learning" and it was a very interesting situation for myself as a teacher to observe and have my students do. My students are use to doing workouts as individuals and racing against each other to have the fastest time. I was a little nervous about having my students working together as a team, but to my surprise they all worked very well together. I put each student into groups of four and assigned a team captain. As a group all of the teams work well together, but they were not holding each other up as God holds us up when we are down. They were not actively encouraging their teammates and were not giving them positive feedback. This as a teacher bothered me a lot becuase the workout they did was very hard and I know if there was no one encourging me I would want to give up or my time would not be as fast. As the last team was finishing I got closer to the team and starting cheering that team on, yelling loud "Good job" "Keep working hard and many other positive reinforcement. Some of my students started to laugh and were wondering why I was yelling so loud. When all of the teams were down and were sitting down to listen to final discussion, I began talking to them how teammates hold each other up when they are down or not playing well. And how in class you still need to hold your classmates up as you do on a team. I hope that my students got the connection between sports and clas