Were I the devil’s advocate, I would say the title of this article begs the question of whether secondary classrooms should go about including cooperative learning approaches at all.

Permit me an anecdote: Not all that long ago, I was invited to meet a headteacher of a medium-sized high school. The meeting was at the behest of his euphoric feeder school, where we had successfully implemented cooperative learning over the past four years, which meant that the latest cohort to enter year 7 had been using cooperative learning throughout key stage 2.

The secondary head and his deputy could not praise these children enough: their academic knowledge, vocabulary, language-use, engagement in learning, eagerness to partake, helpfulness towards their struggling peers.

With starry eyes, the two men noted our young alumni could be spotted in the corridors, “simply from the way they carried themselves”.

After they had spent half the allotted time extolling the virtues of the product I was selling, I naïvely asked which steps the high school had in mind for continuing those children’s cooperative learning journey.

The two men looked confused, as if I had suddenly asked their opinion on my tie. Plans? The school had “other priorities”. Only prior warnings from English colleagues about me being “too Danish and too direct” stopped me from asking just which “other priorities” defeated forging helpful, self-confident youngsters with good grades.

But this is by no means a unique experience. Secondary schools in England seem almost allergic to cooperative learning. This is even more curious now that the Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit has increased the average impact of cooperative learning in secondaries from five to six months of additional progress per-student, per-year. That is the joint second highest impact size in the toolkit, trumped only by metacognition/self-regulation (EEF, 2021).

Indeed, aside from enhancing academic achievement and closing gaps, cooperative learning can potentially address a range of slippery legal, statutory and moral imperatives relevant in the later key stages, such as work/life readiness, inclusiveness, the still-obligatory fundamental British values, the “skills to think critically and debate political questions” (p227 of the national curriculum in case you were wondering), enterprise education, character development, access to higher education, and mental health.

The last point is especially poignant as 80% of the university students who took part in Rethinks’ pre-Covid survey, reported that their mental health problems began in high school (2019).

What is cooperative learning?

Cooperative learning is an approach to teaching. Knowledge and skills are modelled by the teacher and then learners are able to practise these skills in a series of structured activities (called CLIPS). Such interaction tends to promote a basic acceptance of oneself as a competent person.

As Johnson & Johnson state (1994), in cooperative learning: “Students’ learning goals may be structured to promote cooperative, competitive, or individualistic efforts. In every classroom, instructional activities are aimed at accomplishing goals and are conducted under a goal structure.”

The continue: “A learning goal is a desired future state of demonstrating competence or mastery in the subject area being studied. The goal structure specifies the ways in which students will interact with each other and the teacher during the instructional session.”

As Johnson and Johnson noted, cooperative learning induces pupils to promote each other’s success, form multidimensional and realistic impressions of each other’s competencies, and give accurate feedback.

Secondary resistance?

So, why the resistance to cooperative learning in secondary? Here are two main reasons.

• The erroneous belief that cooperative learning consists of child-centred games unsuitable for young adults.
• The sheer size and factory-esque nature of secondary schools.

These are fully valid objections, if we suppose that cooperative learning is akin to off-task, unassessable “group work”, “project/problem-based learning” or their many lethal mutations. It is not.

Rather, cooperative learning, as defined by myself and Drew Howard in our book The Beginner’s Guide to Cooperative Learning (2021), is a surgical intervention, lasting as little as 60-seconds, with clearly delineated objectives, and whose execution has been modelled in detail by the teacher through – hold your breath – direct instruction!

Cooperative learning isn’t child’s play

In the book, we have dubbed this type of intervention “Cooperative Learning Interaction Patterns” – CLIPs for short.

A CLIP is a series of content-free action steps that micro-manage how learners interact with each other and your teaching materials. These steps are pre-organised to support (if not directly enforce) at minimum four things: positive interdependence, individual accountability, equal participation, and simultaneous interaction.

Once you mix the content – that is, your tasks, questions and materials – into the action steps of the CLIP, you have created an activity. For this reason, a CLIP may drive virtually any objective in any subject with any age group. Just change the question. For example:

• Key stage 1 English: What would you have done if you were a police officer and found Goldilocks breaking into the three bears’ house?
• Key stage 2 maths: Explain how you would solve this word problem from last year’s SAT paper.
• Key stage 4 business and economics: Summarise the impact of neoliberalism on the UK economy in the 2000s.

Though the content and objectives may vary endlessly as befits the age group and subject, the outward form of these interventions is repeated endlessly, day-in, day-out, so the activity itself does not draw attention from the acquisition of the actual subject matter – which can be the case when you run lots of different activities to “excite” interest.

In the guided, scaffolded and firmly controlled context of a CLIP, students recapping, presenting, supporting, cross-checking, defending, re-negotiating and/or re-evaluating their understanding is sufficient excitement.

So, in response to the first objection above, cooperative learning is not a child’s game. Rather, it is a powerful teaching tool dropped in at relevant intervals in your lesson to drill rapid recall and forge critical thinking with equal ease.

Grease the wheel, don’t reinvent it

So, this leaves objection two. All schools, especially large high schools, are highly complex systems which work because they settle into an equilibrium. This equilibrium has such a hypnotising entropy that most schools struggle to affect much needed change.

But while cooperative learning would seem to demand fairly radical changes judging by its impact on outcomes and ethos, this change does not happen by disrupting routines and systems which have taken years to build and which (may) work (reasonably) well.

On the contrary, the content-void nature of the CLIP means they may be applied as a delivery tool for the systems you have already invested in. Got a series of tasks in your scheme of work? Have a hinge question on last year’s saved whiteboard slide? Want to reuse that YouTube video on Hamlet that seemed to get traction in your other English class? Drop it all into appropriate CLIPs.

It is not about reinventing the wheel, but about greasing the wheel. You deploy the CLIPs in short, controlled bursts because you want your every learner to simultaneously process your teaching by formulating their understanding. You observe and monitor during the CLIP, and then do your next bit of teaching, responding as needed.

In terms of feedback opportunities, cooperative learning generates more live assessment data than most teachers can respond to. No mess: whether used to “retrieve prior learning” or to facilitate “guided practice and lots of it” or “feedback” you can sense Barack Rosenshine’s ghost smiling.

As the professor himself says (2012): “Cooperative learning offers an opportunity for students to get feedback from their peers about correct as well as incorrect responses, which promotes both engagement and learning.”

• Jakob Werdelin is a Danish teacher trainer and consultant specialising in cooperative learning. He designs tailored interventions and training programmes for schools, colleges and universities, charitable bodies, teaching schools, multi-academy trusts and international training providers. He is the founder and director of UK-based Werdelin Education. His has co-authored The Beginner’s Guide to Cooperative Learning (Crown House Publishing, 2021) with Drew Howard. Visit https://bit.ly/3fzUqBL

Further information & resources

• EEF: Collaborative learning approaches, last updated July 2021: https://bit.ly/3GOTnJp
• Johnson & Johnson: An Overview of Cooperative Learning. In Creativity and Collaborative Learning (Thousand, Villa & Nevin (eds), Brookes Press, 1994. Also available: www.co-operation.org/what-is-cooperative-learning/
• Rethinks: Largest survey of its kind reveals extent of university students’ struggles with thoughts of self-harm, loneliness and anxiety, March 2019: https://bit.ly/3nwSTAA
• Rosenshine: Principles of Instruction: Research-based strategies that all teachers should know, American Educator, Spring 2012: http://bit.ly/2ZpbIqW