When negotiation, debate, or team work skills are being taught, practiced, and/or assessed.

When students would be able to learn the material more effectively with peer support than without it.

When students need a break from independent work and teacher-directed activities.

Generally I do not plan cooperative activities unless the lesson meets two or more of those guidelines.  Here are some tips for making cooperative learning simpler:

- Use your objectives to determine whether you want to choose groups, have students choose groups, or arrange them randomly.  I choose groups when I want to have a balance of high, middle, and low achieving students in each group.  For activities that I don’t mind a lot of talking and some playing around, I let the kids pick.  And for activities that are just for practice, won’t be graded, or don’t require a lot of prior knowledge or skill (such as an art project), I pick groups randomly. 

- Use sticker cards as a fun way to divide your students into random groups.  Decide how many students you want in your group (I usually do 4).  Cut index cards in quarters (or into whatever fractional number you want to be in each group).  Place identical stickers on each of the four sections of an index card.  Repeat with a different sticker for each card.  These can be laminated for durability.  When you are ready to use them, shuffle the cards and pass them out upside down randomly to the class.  My procedure is that students flip their cards after my signal, then walk around to find their group, then come up to me so I can see who is in the group and take their sticker cards, and let them choose as a group where in the room they would like to work..  If you have an odd number of students, then the student who did not find that his or her sticker card matched a group can choose any group to join.  You may want to warn your students about trading sticker cards to switch the groups around- my policy is that if I see you trying to trade cards with someone else, you have to work by yourself during the activity.

- Set up a system for monitoring the noise level.  You could turn on music and tell the students that if they can’t hear the music, they are too loud.  You could have a visual on the board, such as a stoplight, to show when the noise level is getting too high.  In addition to specific warnings to individuals, I give three whole class warnings about being too loud, and then they either work silently for five or ten minutes until they show me they can work quietly, or I end the activity altogether.  Sometimes we try again later or on another day, sometimes they simply lose the privilege.

- If you are asked the same question by two groups, you may want to stop the whole class to explain and take additional questions.  Of course it’s best to explain the directions completely before the groups begin so that you do not have to interrupt them or repeat yourself, but sometimes things are unclear to students when they seem obvious to the teacher.  Rather than going over and over the same questions, ask everyone to stop and listen for clarification.  (“Listen carefully, this may be a question that you want to have answered, too.”).

- Assist each group at the very beginning so they can get started and resolve any initial difference in opinion.  I learned the hard way that waiting fifteen minutes to get to a group could mean that the time was completely wasted as two of them refused to work with the other two and nothing was done except argue.

- Use a rubric or checklist for students to grade their group’s collaboration.   Have students indicate whether their group stayed on task, worked together, etc..  You may also want them to grade their individual performance and/or others’ performance to make sure that everyone was pulling their weight.

- Use a timer or bell to get students’ attention and signal when time is up.  This is far better than trying to over talk large numbers of students.