CONCEPT OF COOPERATIVE LEARNING AND TRADITIONAL LEARNING

Collaboration is a wonderful teaching tool. Teachers have the opportunity to assess and differentiate instruction for students more readily and they can learn new instructional techniques from one another to expand their teaching repertoire. Cooperative teaching experiences also provide mutual support and assistance for planning and implementing lessons, assessing students’ progress, sharing professional concerns, and addressing students’ learning needs. Most importantly, teaming allows more opportunities for students to understand and connect with content thereby maximizing individual learning potential.Problems in education have no fixed answers. No teacher education program can prepare teachers for all the situations they will encounter. Teachers themselves will make the final decisions from among many alternatives. Such judgments may be good or poor. Therefore, it is important for teachers to constantly reevaluate their decisions. This can be achieved through collaborative and reflective practices in teacher education. Co-operative learning in teacher education can instill in future teachers the value of social interactions Reflection improves a teacher's ability to make appropriate and sound judgments and, therefore, become an empowered decision-maker. Reflective teaching means looking at what you do in the classroom, thinking about why you do it, and thinking about if it works - a process of self-observation and self-evaluation.By collecting information about what goes on in our classroom, and by analyzing and evaluating this information, we identify and explore our own practices and underlying beliefs. This may then lead to changes and improvements in our teaching.Reflective teaching is therefore a means of professional development which begins in our classroom.