How To Facilitate Cooperative Learning In A Team

How to Facilitate Cooperative Learning in a Team

8 Cool Ways to Kick Off a Class or Meeting

Did you know that there are more than 28,000 three-second moments that happen every single day? The thing is, we totally forget the vast majority of them. 

In this chapter, I’m going to unpack eight really cool opening lines or ways to start off a meeting, class, workshop or training exercise to make an impression and answer the question: How do you facilitate cooperative learning?

We gain so much wisdom by learning from the group. But how do we pull all that together? These methods I’m going to tell you about actually came from a client. I worked with a few hundred faculty, instructors and staff at Ohio State University. Afterward, Brian Raison, a professor at the university, shared this great list. He calls it “Tips for Teaching: Great Opening Lines for Impact.” I thought it was just such a beautiful compilation that I’m going to share my own take on it.

For each tip on the list, I’ll give you a concrete example for how to apply it from my own teaching and facilitation with some of the top universities and organizations on the planet. When I’m leading a group and have 300 people on Zoom, I am really deliberate about the first three seconds. I want what I say to be memorable, and that helps facilitate cooperative learning, bringing people together to create this atmosphere where they want to engage and learn from each other.

Another faculty member at OSU says you do 90% of your teaching in syllabus week, the first week of a semester, in the culture that you set. If you don’t set the foundation for cooperative learning, you can expect that it won’t happen for the rest of the semester.

Here are the eight ways to lead off a class, inspired by Brian Raison and my own experience:

1. Start with a startling statistic, surprise or unexpected fact.
2. Open with a quotation.
3. Use a thinking analogy.
4. Ask a rhetorical or challenging question.
5. Deploy a quiz or survey.
6. Tell a personal story.
7. Note the occasion.
8. Bring a prop. 

1. Start with a startling statistic, surprise or unexpected fact.

I began this chapter with a startling statistic. You probably hadn’t considered that there are nearly 30,000 three-second moments every day, and we forget 98% of them. That attention-grabbing stat turns on people’s brains.

2. Open with a quotation.

I find this one immensely useful and extremely easy to implement. In the very beginning, you want to create some kind of context hook that engages people and activates their brains.

I use the deck of We! Engage Cards that we created. The quote I’ll often open up with to facilitate cooperative learning is an idea from Bill Nye The Science Guy: “Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.” The moment I say that it changes the context for any breakout session that I might do on Zoom as well as any in-person interaction.

Everyone in your group, no matter whether they’re younger or older, or have less experience or more, has something in their brain that you don’t have in your own.

The We! Engage Cards have quotes on one side and images on the other. There are a ton of really cool cooperative learning exercises to get people connected and engaged in a way run-of-the-mill meetings won’t. You can go to our website www.weand.me/free to download a free digital version of the cards or order the actual deck and have it shipped to you.

By sharing a quote, you can immediately set the tone or provide context in a learning environment. Pick whichever quote speaks to the environment you want to create in that moment.

3. Use a thinking analogy.

Analogies and metaphors are so powerful because they make things that are abstract or seemingly irrelevant directly relevant to your students or team. You’re referencing something that’s familiar to help them grasp a new concept.

4. Ask a rhetorical or challenging question.

I do this often. I wrote a book with Will Wise, my co-founder at We and Me, called Ask Powerful Questions: Create Conversations That Matter. Oftentimes, if I’m leading a workshop on the book, I find it’s fitting to start with a question.

I might ask, When you meet someone for the first time, what questions do you typically ask? Even in a crowd of hundreds or thousands online in a class or webinar, I’ll invite people to quickly share questions we typically ask.

What I get back is, How are you? Where are you from? What do you do? Even in a group of a thousand, we come up with the same four to five questions right off the top of our heads.

I’ve now invited the group’s perspective into that cooperative learning. It’s like saying let me learn from you. Let me live out that quote from Bill Nye. You can focus on questions that break outside that routine-question rut.

The example that Brian uses that I really appreciate evokes emotion. In this case, he asks that students do NOT raise their hands in response to make it a little more psychologically safe. He asks, “In your minds, raise your hand if you know the feeling of having blue flashing lights show up behind you when you’re driving?” Then he asks students to imagine that immediate adrenaline rush or whatever you’re feeling. 

If you’re in a biology or psychology class, that question is a great way to begin talking about the fight-or-flight response or to introduce the region of the brain called the amygdala. It’s something that resonates with people.

5. Deploy a quiz or survey.

I’ll actually invite people to raise their hands to respond to a survey.

I’ll ask, for example, if students have any siblings, nieces, nephews or kids who are about 3 to 5 years old. Of course, there’s always somebody who doesn’t. They’re 22 and single and don’t have a big extended family. If I see everybody doesn’t have their hand raised, I’ll ask a follow-up question to introduce a little humor. How many of you at some point in your life were a little kid? Then everybody’s hand goes up.

This provides a little levity, helps students engage and sets the tone really well for what I’m going to share next in that workshop. In that case, I might talk about the way our brains develop.

If you know a kid who’s 3 to 5, you know they constantly ask why. Our brains get really rooted in the pathway of asking why questions. But in the book Ask Powerful Questions, we invite people to cut why out of their vocabulary. Instead, ask questions that only begin with how or what. 

This is a great way to connect and come across as less judgmental when you’re talking with someone new. If the aim is to build a relationship of trust with another person, it helps to let go of why questions. 

With my example question, I’m engaging students by talking about how their brain developed when they were 3 to 5. That is personalizing learning in a beautiful way.

6. Tell a personal story.

I don’t really understand all the neuroscience or psychology behind why our brains are so wired for stories. Since humans have existed, we gathered in circles and around fires and told stories. Before the written word, we had word of mouth.

There’s just something in our brains that loves stories. I witness this when I’m speaking in a virtual context and in person. The group leans in when I’m sharing an idea and I start telling a story.

One story I often share is this: 15 minutes before I got married, I was asked one of the most powerful questions I’ve ever gotten. It changed the way I experienced that day, and even the nature of my relationship with my wife. Right away, you want to know, what was the question? (For the answer, read the chapter on “How to Motivate Virtual Teams” earlier in the book.)

A good suspenseful story creates that curiosity gap. And when we hear a story, we relate to people.

One thing I’d add is a personal challenge I’ve accepted. I try to share my own failures, missteps and mistakes, and other people’s successes. That’s because those stories are way more relatable than if you just say look how awesome I am, and count the ways. That’s part of the reason I wanted to highlight Brian’s eight tips, instead of just drawing from my own experience. 

I actually keep a log of my failures and missteps, a failure resume. I have a Google Doc I update for this. Every time I make some stupid mistake or do something that doesn’t land very well, I add it to my failure resume. Then anytime I need to pull in a story or an opening line for a workshop, I can go to that story bank to cue my brain.

7. Note the occasion, and state the intention.

I’ve added the “state your intent” piece to this suggested opening tip. If we gather and the intention isn’t crystal clear from the very beginning, we risk getting way off course.

8. Bring a prop.

This is especially valuable in virtual learning. The brain is wired to take in visual data and encode it into long-term memory. 

If I’m kicking off a workshop and we’re going to be digging into questions on listening from Ask Powerful Questions, I might immediately start off by talking about how ears have the ability to change what happens in your brain. I’ll use visuals of an ear and a brain to illustrate the impact of listening. That makes it more likely people will remember what I’m teaching.

Props are cool, too, if you’re in a virtual context. I had a client who I was coaching around storytelling at a big annual company conference. We were on Zoom, and he had this really cool background. I asked him if there was any item on his back wall that had a story behind it he could tell. Sure enough, he had an intricate mask from South America and a flag from his grandfather that he pulled off the wall during his message to bring closer to the camera. This allowed attendees to feel like they were interacting with his space a bit more.

By the way, you can actually combine any or all of the eight techniques above. I might reach behind me if I’m on Zoom and grab my throwable microphone and talk about Catchbox, the engagement microphone, and the awesome work that they do creating audience engagement. I could use this object to talk about how I interact with an audience to break that sage-on-a-stage dynamic.

When you interact with your space, everything comes to life, engages people’s curiosity, and makes your team meeting more dynamic.