M4. Building Democratic Learning Communities

From chapter 6, I learned that democratic classroom teach students how to be respectful of each other and how to cooperate with others.

From chapter 7, I learned that cooperative learning involves learning in small groups where the teacher assigns the group and collaborative learning involves learning in small groups that are either randomized or student selected.

From my experience, I learned that the composition of the small group for cooperative learning is extremely important. During fieldwork, I observed that the groups that worked the best together completed their work in a timely fashion and it was quality work. However, the groups that had clashing opinions needed a lot of extra time to finish their project and the students were visibly frustrated. Although it's important for students to work with different people, teachers will want to make sure that they test new group pairings for a small assignment so that the best group compositions are saved for the biggest projects where the students will have to work together for long periods of time.