Cooperative Learning: A Trip to the Bank

On Tuesday April 9th, my group and I taught a cooperative learning lesson to the second grade class. The topic was again "A Trip to the Bank". This was our third and final lesson. The lesson went exactly as we planned. We quickly reviewed information from our previous lessons and then broke up into three groups.  I worked in a group with Michaela. Two of the students in our group have IEP's. We placed them in the same group purposely, so Michaela and I were prepared to work to accommodate their needs. Our group worked to create an advertisement for a store that sold various goods. The students each chose their own good and prices. They then drew pictures for each. Our group project could have been improved by adding more academic language to it. The students did not use as much academic language as we hoped. Another group worked to create a chart that differentiated more expensive goods and services from less expensive goods and services. The purpose of this was for students to discuss whether they should spend money on a good or save money/take out a loan before purchasing a good. The third group worked together to write a poem. The students were all excited and happy to work together. They were motivated and stayed on task. We had enough time to teach each part of our lesson plan. The students were given a form that allowed them to grade their peers as well as themselves.
Our lesson could have been improved in several ways:
We could have incorporated more academic language.
We could have assigned group roles prior to the lesson, instead of letting each student pick their role. This caused a loss of time as well as some disagreement among students. Overall, my fellow teachers and I were proud of our work as well as the work of the students. We feel that they clearly followed all parts of the GROUPS acronym.