Abstract:

Teaching effectively a class of students from different educational backgrounds has always been very challenging. Sometimes the difficulty of this process rises to the highest level when a professor is called to teach a class that has a small group of exceptionally good students (top 5% of students in the USA) along with a large group of average students. In this paper we describe a teaching approach, the methodology and the instructional practices we have used that has had tremendous success for the past 10 years. Our approach incorporates the fundamental elements of cooperative learning and goes way beyond that. We create a cooperative team environment where the professor is the “head coach” who empowers a small group of the most qualified students/group-leaders to be the “assistant coaches”. The paper presents the methodology, evaluates the results and makes a number of suggestions for a customizable application of this approach to both undergraduate and graduate classrooms. To improve the overall academic learning experience of students, we support promotive interactions, positive interdependence as well as individual and group accountability. We report our observations that students learning cooperatively can capitalize on “assistant coaches” and one another’s resources and skills evaluating their ideas as well as one another’s ideas. Students learn more effectively when part of the materials come from fellow classmates. Furthermore, the teacher's role changes from giving the same pieces of information to the entire class to facilitating every student’s learning.