Cooperative learning in action: strategies that work in the classroom Debates on Education. By Nancy A. Madden

Nancy Madden, president, CEO and co-founder of Success for All, is a researcher and creator of educational programmes that seek to improve learning and students' academic performance, particularly those in less advantaged environments. She is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education's Center for Research and Reform in Education and also at the University of York's Institute for Effective Education.
What has cooperative learning contributed to the success of the "Success for All" model? How can good academic performance be achieved with experiences that are also sustainable over time? How can these experiences be articulated in more complex and disadvantaged environments? How can cooperative work help students take ownership of their own learning process? What impact can it ultimately have on academic performance? And what evidence do we have?
In spite of the potential we attribute to cooperative learning, grounded on a conception of learning as a social process that views students' motivation and emotional engagement as aspects that are closely related with achievement, its presence in the classrooms does not yet seem to have the place that it no doubt should have in our response to the complex reality we find every day at the schools.
However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the benefits of a social organization of learning processes. Integrating cooperation in the design of educational processes offers a valuable contribution to the development of different types of skills that can be brought into play. How can teachers use this valuable teaching strategy to obtain maximum benefit from it?
According to Nancy A. Madden and Robert Slavin, co-creators of Success for All, cooperative learning may offer a suitable methodology for treating a broad range of educational problems. What impact can the different formulas for applying this way of understanding learning have on academic performance? Which methods might be most effective? What factors should be considered for effective application?
Nancy Madden will tell us how the schools included in the Success for All project operate. How do they work with their students? How does the group as a whole share responsibility for their learning? What role can technologies play in developing these forms of cooperative work? What preparation do teachers need to design and develop these teaching and learning strategies? How can classroom activity be managed in these situations? In short, how are social, emotional, behavioural and cooperative skills integrated and put into play simultaneously to meet the demands of the school syllabus? Should success be understood as a process of co-responsibility shared between teachers, families, community and the students themselves? Lastly, how can the evidence provided by research support the value of this methodology?
Debates on Education is a forum organized by the Jaume Bofill Foundation and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, with the cooperation of the MACBA. Its goal is to foster debate on current and underlying issues that we consider fundamentally important for the challenges and problems faced by education in the current social, political and economic context.
Moderators: Josep M Mominó, lecturer at the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and Valtencir Mendes, Head of international projects of the Jaume Bofill Foundation.