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When you’re at work and an unfamiliar task comes across your desk, the first thing you do is reach out to your teammates. You’ll probably ask them if they know what it’s about or whether they can help you out. This is what teamwork is all about.
You cooperate with your team members, lean on each other and, in the process, complete your tasks more effectively and efficiently.
Cooperative learning methods help you get along with your teammates. When you learn something together, you’ll likely spend more time with each other, understand different perspectives and accommodate different work styles. It’s an effective strategy for team building and collaboration.
Discover the advantages of cooperative learning in a professional environment and how you can benefit from it as an individual.
What Is Cooperative Learning?
Cooperative learning is a strategy based on the principle that when you have to solve a problem, it’s better to do it in smaller groups and then sharing your ideas with everyone else. This peer learning technique is effective when you want to build rapport with your teammates, identify your strengths and work collaboratively.
Each member of the team gets a chance to participate and present their ideas. With equal participation there’s equal rigor to bring something unique and creative to the table. If you’re a manager dealing with a high-stakes situation, you can implement a cooperative learning strategy in your team to mobilize them. Everyone gets assigned a task that plays to their strengths while you can oversee their progress, measure successes and help mitigate risks.
Let’s find out the benefits of cooperative learning to assess whether it works for you.
Advantages Of Cooperative Learning
As a means to build teamwork, cooperation and collaboration, there are many advantages of cooperative learning, especially in a professional setting. You can understand this by the simple yet powerful exercise of brainstorming. When you have to come up with solutions to a problem, the best way is to bring in your team, and discuss what works and what doesn’t. This collaborative environment itself is conducive to great ideas that’ll help you achieve organizational goals.
Here are some of the advantages of cooperative learning:
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Achieving Excellence
Working with others is when you truly realize your strengths and weaknesses. For instance, you may have to take care of communicating with clients as part of your team. In the process, you’ll learn whether you’re good at it or if you need to improve. Cooperative learning helps you achieve excellence because you acknowledge your improvement areas. Trying your best to be the best is what cooperative learning does for you.
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Building Teamwork
The most important advantage of cooperative learning is, of course, building teamwork and collaboration. It helps to depend on others for some tasks that require a collaborative effort. You can use this opportunity to understand your teammates and decode their work styles. Everyone has something unique to bring to your group and you can maximize their skills to accomplish your objectives and goals.
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Effective Communication
The more you work with one another, the better your communication skills will be. From minutes of a meeting and emails to phone calls and video conferencing, there’s a lot of communication that goes on behind the scenes. Cooperative learning helps you open up in a team, share your ideas freely without fearing judgment and streamline your communication to get your points across. This is especially helpful when you’re short on time and need to convey your ideas to a teammate.
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Time Management
Cooperative learning is conducted within a timeframe where everyone has tasks assigned to them. This way you learn more about positive interdependence and how your task depends on someone else’s. Although you have to work independently, eventually each part needs to come together as a whole. You’ll learn to manage your time accordingly to avoid delays in the chain of tasks that need to be performed.
Benefits of cooperative learning comprise building essential 21st-century skills. However, there are both advantages and disadvantages of cooperative learning.
Some of the disadvantages are:
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Each member of the team will likely work at a different pace that can derail a project unless they’re brought on the same page
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Sometimes your goals may not align with your coworkers’ and this can cause a rift or conflict that can impact the project and your performance
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Those who are more outgoing may dominate conversations and meetings overshadowing the quieter members of the team
So, as with everything in life, there are pros and cons of incorporating cooperative learning. If used wisely, it can help you improve your technical and foundational skills.
Distinguish Yourself In A Crowd
Harappa’s Practicing Excellence course will teach you how you can put your best foot forward and realize your true potential. There’s always scope for improvement and you’ll find that focusing on the learning curve of a task can change your perspective. With frameworks like The Four Selfs of Excellence, you’ll learn more about how you can be your best self. Prioritize your tasks, understand what’s important and make small improvements to take a step in the right direction.
Explore topics such as The Importance Of Time Management, What Is Cooperative Learning, Difference Between Cooperative and Collaborative Learning, How Does The Pomodoro Technique Work & How To Increase Your Memory Power from Harappa Diaries to advance in your career.
