The Evil of Excellence

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• The cooperative and socialization goals make a lot more sense in elementary school than in high school. I like some of the experiments that you've mentioned in your blog about making students responsible for their peer's learning... I have a little of that in my blogging portfolio (particularly the "xenoblogging" component), and of course that's an important part of class participation, but I hated group work when I was a student, so I don't emphasize it very much in my own teaching. (That wasn't true when I used to teach technical writing, when group projects were an important part of the syllabus.)

• Thanks for passing this one along. I think the originating article by Susan Black still offers some good strategies on stressing cooperation over competition, even if her implicit zeal to curb competition in the classroom is overdone or pollyanna. Black stresses that teachers need to emphasize: 1. Positive interdependence (i.e., rewarding teamework); 2. Individual accountability (i.e., students are held accountable for both agreed-upon standards and to the team rather than just the teacher); 3. Face-to-face interaction (i.e., group work that interacts with the teacher); 4. Social skills (i.e., leadership and decision making activities applied to the group). 5. Group processing (i.e., student groups evaluate themselves).

  If one of the hidden curricula of schools is to socialize, then social-oriented teaching seems like a good idea to me. Competition by nature puts the needs of the one over the needs of the many.