How does teamwork work?

PowerTeaching: Mathematics emphasizes team goals that can only be achieved when all members of the team are learning and improving. The task is not only to do something as a team but also to learn something as a team. Because individual students compare their scores with their own past performance, and no one else’s, every team member is able to contribute equally to the success of the team.

But how should this kind of experience be structured? According to research, three elements are key to making cooperative learning effective: team recognition, individual accountability, and equal opportunities for success.

INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNTABILITY
Teams work together to complete a project, solve a problem, or prepare for a test, but each student is responsible for completing an individual product and taking a test. There are no group grades.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR SUCCESS
Cooperative learning is often portrayed as involving team grades, asking one child to do the work for four, or turning control of the classroom over to students. In PowerTeaching: Mathematics, cooperative learning means none of these things. Instead, as Michael D. Rettig and Robert Lynn Canady point out, “The essence of cooperative learning is that we work together, we learn together, but we are held individually accountable for our own learning” (2000, p. 233). Here, too, the research is unequivocal: Structuring opportunities for team members to help prepare every member to achieve success on the Lesson Cycle Assessment and rewarding teams for their efforts is the most effective cooperative-learning model.
 

TEAM RECOGNITION
Students work in heterogeneous teams of four or fi ve members, and teams earn certificates or other recognition for achieving a designated standard together.