CLEARING MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT COOPERATIVE LEARNINGTHROUGH PERSONAL EXPERIENCES

Cooperative learning is a successful teaching strategy in which small teams, each with students of different levels of ability, use a variety of learning activities to improve their understanding of a subject. Each member of a team is responsible not only for learning what is taught but also for helping teammates learn, thus creating an atmosphere of achievement. Students work through the assignment until all group members successfully understand and complete it. The author has been using cooperative learning strategy for the last eight odd years. She has observed that although teachers in general have a positive opinion about cooperative learning they have their reservations regarding the hurdles which one may face while using cooperative learning strategy. Some of these are hurdles are due to misconception. The author through this paper tries to clear eight such misconceptions using her experiences with cooperative learning teaching strategy.