Educating to cooperation means offering tools and opportunities for research and analysis instead of answers and solutions
Most of the children, before 3 and a half years, struggles to work in a group: they feel more comfortable in individual activities, especially in those in which they are not yet “capable”.
Interest, objectives, methods and working times are strongly subjective and personal. For example, some very skilled children in language have yet to practice on motor coordination, just as those who are skilled in space orientation may have to train in drawing or in the relationship with others.
Plurality of needs and organizational difficulties
These individual specificities make the organization of group activities complex, which often prove to be difficult to manage: some children are interested, others less, some are already very competent, others not yet.
The teacher can struggle to lead a structured and homogeneous activity, because it must be able to adapt the communication, the material used, the difficulty of execution and the timing to a plurality of needs and skills.
Around 6 years, all children have achieved a good degree of development in the various skills: motor, linguistic, manuals and relational. This “homogeneity” makes children ready for comparison and sharing.
After 4 years of age, the desire to “do together” is accentuated: interest in board games grows and for symbolic game and children love to carry out activities with adults and in the company of peers.
Together or separated?
The school is hardly aligned with this development address, since it offers laboratory and group activities to the nursery and the kindergarten in which all children together, at the same time, find themselves experimenting with the manipulation of pasta, painting or gymnastics, having to share working times, materials and projects.
Then, during the years of primary school, children tend to be directed towards individual work: single work desks, sometimes spaced from each other, prohibition to copy or carry out the tasks together, individual numerical votes, reports of tables, speed in the operations and resolution of problems, “educating” them thus to comparison and the competition.
At the same time, however, the desire to educate to empathy, altruism, cooperation, listening and sharing, preparing the new (future) workforce for the network work, to Cooperative Learning and al Brain Storming.
How is it possible without exercise? How can a person be able to work on the net with ten others, without having experienced this mode in the years of training?
Cooperation education
Educating to cooperation can also be renounced individuality. As? With the measure, balance, common sense and of course listening to children and making an act of humility as teachers.
Educating to cooperation – allowing children to cooperate – provides that the teacher or teacher accept results that are not predictable in advance, solutions to the problems other than those hypothesizedmethods of achieving the objectives decided during the work by the working group.
Educating to cooperation provides for an analysis and redesign of the work environment, with a decentralization of the chair and, consequently, of the role of the master as the main, if not unique, the fulcrum of the educational process. It could happen that a partner knows how to answer a pupil’s question, instead of the teacher. What would this entail? The one who is helped could experience the value of asking for help and those who help could feel important and satisfied. At the same time, the teacher could cover the role of the moderator, rather than the dispenser of notions, facilitating learning processes and promoting solidarity and cooperation. It means offering tools and opportunities for research and analysis instead of answers and solutions.
The role of educators
But for this to happen, those who are in the chair should want to leave room for children, making sure that they can speak and move in the environment, it should encourage comparison and exchange, educate the discussion, develop skills as a mediator and give up a privileged and self -centered position.
Children should ask questions and the teachers should create the environmental and relational conditions to give them the opportunity to try by themselves and build the answersinviting to the reasoning, to the union of the forces and skills of each.
This reasoning was born from the difficulty, daily, of the Nursery and Child Educators to make children work and the difficulty of making children individually work in primary school.
The problem, in my opinion, is precisely the discrepancy between the needs of the children and the related educational responses that the school offers.
Perhaps the difficulty of “keeping the class”, at any age we are referring, could be overcome if you listen to the children, if you take into account their inclination, of the needs that through behavior show us.
We protect individual work when children show the need to work “alone” to concentrate on themselves and allow children to be cooperative when they show this competence and manifest their desire.
