I had not been doing this because my special needs child had little or no speech. When we all began doing the same subjects, she began to respond to the other children, making more attempts to communicate verbally with them.

I still wasn’t satisfied. Things were going well, but my special needs child was still not interacting enough with other children. Also, some of my other students were beginning to show very serious problems. They needed more of my time.

Then one day in Woodstock I was introduced to cooperative learning. The workshop was exiting. I felt that I had a partial solution to my problems in the classroom. This strategy made sense. There are a lot of things you need to learn about cooperative learning, but basically it is students helping students strive toward an academic goal. Not only academic skills but social skills are taught and evaluated.

It took awhile to set up the cooperative lessons, but when they began they were exciting. The children were working together in groups, responsible for their own learning as well as others’ learning. It was amazing to see children on their knees in their chairs, working through problems or discussing different topics. Now it was really hard work to pick out my special needs child. She was part of the class, working along with the other children, sometimes with an aide, sometimes with me, but mostly with the children. She was well on her way to becoming independent as well as interdependent.