One of our major professional development focuses for our school this year is to increase the amount of cooperative strategies that we use in the classroom. The focus is on increasing student engagement by reducing the amount of teacher talk and replacing it with guided practice that the students perform. We have been focusing on implementing one new strategy a week each time we meet together in our grade level meetings. One strategy that we are currently focusing on is called numbered heads together. In this activity the teacher asks everyone in the group to number off 1-4. After they have numbered off, the teacher then poses a question to the students and everyone spends time thinking and answering the questions independently. After answering time is over, they then can share with each other or the teacher can asks students who have a certain number to share aloud with the whole class. As wed move forward and start to implement more strategies I will try to update my blog with that information. On another note, if you have effective cooperative strategies that you would like to share please feel free to leave us a comment.

Mr. McClung