How do you stop a bully? “Punch him in the nose,” Dad says. “Ignore him and he’ll go away,” counsels Mom. Not hardly. There’s only one way to stop a bully and that’s…cooperative learning?
“As an essential part of the school curriculum, we have to teach children how to be good to one another, how to cooperate, how to defend someone who is being picked on and how to stand up for what is right,” say Susan Engel and Marlene Sandstrom of Williams College. Weighing in on a Massachusetts law that mandates an anti-bullying curriculum, and requires schools to report serious cases to police, Engel and Sandstrom say a sense of responsibility for the well-being of others should be “an essential criterion” for what it means to be well-educated. “Children need to know that adults consider kindness and collaboration to be every bit as important as algebra and reading,” they write in a New York Times op-ed.
“In groups and one-on-one sessions, students and teachers should be having conversations about relationships every day….Teachers also need to structure learning activities in which children are interdependent and can learn to view individual differences as unique sources of strength. It’s vital that every student, not just the few who sign up for special projects or afterschool activities, be involved in endeavors that draw them together.”
Look at Norway, they say, where everyone from teachers to janitors to bus drivers are trained to spot bullying and how to intervene. “Clearly, when a school and a community adopt values that are rooted in treating others with dignity and respect, children’s behavior can change,” write Engel and Sandstrom.
Katharine Beals plays Kumbaya Killer. The author of Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World writes on her blog: “What’s egregiously missing from this Norwegian comparison is any mention of Norwegian school children working cooperatively on academic assignments.”
“The anecdotes I collected for my book strongly suggest that group learning environments, rather than preventing bullying, are often arenas for it. Bullying can be quite subtle and difficult to detect; teachers cannot supervise multiple groups simultaneously; unsocial and socially awkward children regularly report being teased and ignored as the social hierarchy of the playground creeps into the classroom’s “cooperative groups”–whenever the teacher is out of earshot.
Beals is impatient with those who “never stray within earshot of children who are supposed to be working together” in K-12 classrooms. Instead, says Beals they “happily write Op-Ed pieces about how wonderfully these groups promote social harmony so long as they are ‘properly implemented.’”
Group work has become the ShamWow of education. It raises test scores! It teaches 21st Century Skills! It even stops bullying! It’s becoming the reason to go to school in the first place. I’m fine with group work when it suits the content of the lesson, but I don’t care for the all group work, all the time orthodoxy. And I’m skeptical that it’s a panacea for all that ails our schools—academic or social.