TURNING THE CLASSROOM UPSIDE DOWN USING COOPERATIVE LEARNING STRATEGIES: A CASE STUDY OF LEARNING CHEMISTRY AT VIARÓ SCHOOL

English is without a doubt the actual universal language and our school, Viaró, knows the importance and the need to master this language. Chemistry is often a subject where students can be very interested in the beginning but most of them opine learning chemistry is not easy and the difficulties of learning are basically due to the high interdependence with other subjects.

The use of traditional learning strategies used in our school has worked quite well. Despite acceptable results, today we live in a world in which a change we do need in the way of teaching using new technologies and new learning strategies where students become more involved in their education and keep a high level of motivation and interest for achieving high knowledge and basic competences needed today for professional lives.

In order to enhance academic results and maintain a high level of participation and motivation of our students in chemistry classes it was decided to make use of cooperative learning strategies.

For these reasons, it was decided to create, implement and optimize a general lesson plan based on cooperative learning.

In our case, it was decided to structure classes around small groups which worked together with positive interdependence and individual responsibility. From Viaró was founded, 50 years ago, our school, there have been 6 teams (Fúries, Dofí, Falcó, Huracà, Cicló and Jaguar) which have been used for physical education purposes. Each student belongs to one of these teams. The feeling of membership in a team is very high and this is seen in the various competitions and events held during the academic year. The small groups consisted of 2-3 people who had in common that belonged to the same Viaró team. The groups were balanced using the teacher’s criteria (the teacher took into account the students’ skills).
Regarding language used, the subject was taught in Spanish, Catalan or English. The teacher provided students the basic contents or some key words in all three languages and explained their meanings. When English was used, a CLIL approach was applied.

All group members needed to be involved in the resolution of each activity. The teacher determined a time for solving the activity. One member was in charge of controlling time and enforcing all disciplinary rules and procedures.

Any member of the group had to understand and know how to properly explain the activity. One member of the group had the mission of ensuring that everybody was able to explain the solution of the activity.

Every student needed to listen carefully to each answer. The teacher could ask any student to repeat the answer given by another student.
The teacher could ask questions related to new and old concepts with the aim of brushing them up.

While students worked in order to reach the activity's solution, the teacher was walking around the different groups and observing how they worked. The teacher could also spend that time refreshing them some instructions or simply asking how it was going.

These strategies were tested with the Chemistry Baccalaureate students from our school.

The key findings of this study are that students become more active and participate in class triggering a positive atmosphere. Another remarkable result is that the confidence of students with great difficulties is improved.

It may be concluded that cooperative learning affect positively the motivation of Chemistry students.