35.8 The Cooperative School

The new electronic tools are radically changing the way people access and use information and, therefore, have profound implications for the educational process. Education, on the other hand, is stuck with organizational patterns and professional traditions that negate many of the advantages of the new technologies. For technology to be fully utilized in schools, the organizational structure of the school has. to change as well as the organizational structure of the classroom. To utilize the new technologies most effectively, schools need to change from a mass-manufacturing organizational structure to a team-based, high-performance organizational structure. This new organizational structure is created when cooperative learning is used the majority of the time in the classroom, and cooperation is used to structure faculty and staff work in (a) colleagial teaching teams, (b) school-based decision making, and (c) faculty meetings (Johnson & Johnson, 1994a).

Just as the heart of the classroom is cooperative learning, the heart of the school is colleagial teaching teams: small cooperative groups in which members work to improve continuously each other's (a) instructional expertise and success in general and (b) expertise in using cooperative learning in particular. Administrators may also be organized into colleagial support groups to increase their administrative expertise and success.

School-based decision making may be structured through the use of two types of cooperative teams. A task force considers a school problem and proposes a solution to the faculty as a whole. The faculty is then divided into ad-hoc decision-making groups and considers whether to accept or modify the proposal. The decisions made by the ad-hoc groups are summarized, and the entire faculty then decides on the action to be taken to solve the problem.

Faculty meetings represent a microcosm of what administrators think the school should be. The clearest modeling of cooperative procedures in the school may be in faculty meetings and other meetings structured by the schqol administration. All four types of cooperative leaming (formal, informal, base groups, and controversy) may be used at faculty meetings to increase their productivity, build faculty cohesion, and improve the faculty's social competence.

Technological innovation lags in schools. A key obstacle to the use of technology in schools is the limited support teachers have for integrating unfamiliar technologies into instruction. Just as students group together to learn cooperatively how to use new software or hardware, teachers need to group together to learn how to use the new technologies and then how to integrate them into the instruction. As long as each teacher works in isolation from his or her peers, the implementation of technology represents a personal decision on the part of each teacher, rather than an organization. change at the school and district levels. Many teachers are unfamiliar with the new technologies and feel unable to master them. In order to implement technology fully, the organizational structure of the school has to change from the old mass-manufacturing organizational structure to a team-based, high-performance organizational structure where teams of teachers can explore the new technologies, learn how to use them, and implement them together.