Shlomo Sharan’s research while affiliated with Tel Aviv University and other places

The book describes the theoretical background of Group Investigation (GI), presents the essence of GI, outlines how to set the stage for GI, presents five examples of GI projects in various subjects and grades, research studies of its effectiveness, and, finally, two examples of teacher training workshops for GI.

In group investigation, students actively plan what and how they will study by forming cooperative groups according to common interests in a topic. Based on a six-stage process, group investigation is an effective medium for encouraging and guiding students' involvement in learning. A sidebar summarizes relevant research. Includes 17 references. (MLH)

A training model for prospective teachers of cooperative learning involves teachers creating a cooperative classroom for themselves in a workshop setting. The model combines experience, perception, cognition, and behavior. (MLF)

Do teachers from different academic disciplines possess different ‘theories of knowledge’ and different attitudes toward education, and are these attitudes related to their classroom practices? Those were the main questions posed in this study in which 142 secondary school teachers from eight schools in the Tel‐Aviv, Israel, area responded to a detailed questionnaire constructed to explore these topics. The responses of teachers of Sciences, Humanities and Languages were compared on 4 scales of progressive versus traditional attitudes and classroom instructional methods, namely: 1. students’ use of varied informational sources for studying academic topics; 2. students’ use of their personal experience for studying and applying academic knowledge; 3. relating given academic material to other disciplines; and 4. teachers’ instructional style (lecture versus experientially orientated learning). Findings indicate that teachers’ views of knowledge, as objective bodies of information or as ideas emerging from personal experience and interpretation, their attitudes toward education and classroom behavior, differed as a function of academic discipline on 3 scales. All teachers concurred on the importance of relating academic knowledge to the students’ life experience. Humanities teachers emerged as the most progressive, language teachers as the least progressive on the three scales, while science teachers were located midway between the other two groups. These results are consistent with Bernstein's theory that academic studies socialize teachers into distinct subgroups that display different orientations toward knowledge and the nature of teaching. The authors wish to thank Dr Mordechai Miron of the School of Education, Tel‐Aviv University, for his helpful suggestions regarding the analysis of the data reported here.

Israel is a country of immigrants whose ethnic ties are roughly divided into two groups: Jews who emmigrated to Israel from the Muslim countries of the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa (referred to as Middle Eastern), and those who came from Europe, the Americas, and South Africa (referred to as Western). The integration of these two major ethnic groups is acknowledged to be one of the central problems confronting Israel’s educational system. The population of the country is roughly equally divided at present between the two groups. Research on various aspects of school desegregation in Israel has been extensively summarized in a recent volume (Amir & Sharan, 1984).

One of the primary institutions for socialization in society is the school. The entire school and classroom system can be viewed as a critical arena for the study and development of prosocial behavior. However, to date, a substantial amount of research and theoretical writing has accumulated concerning how parental childrearing at home, and other adult influences outside the school system, contribute to the development of positive behavior in children (Staub, 1978, 1979). In recent publications, several attempts have been made to apply theoretical concepts and laboratory findings to other social settings, especially to schools (Bar-Tal, 1978; Bar-Tal & Raviv, 1982; Harris, Eisenberg, & Carroll, 1982; Staub, 1981). The assumption is that a “teacher” replaces the “parent” in the socialization sequence and thus the same processes that enhance prosocial behavior in general are applicable to teacher-student relationships in the classroom. However, since there are very few research findings to support such an assumption, one may question its validity especially in light of the vast differences between “life in the classroom” (Jackson, 1968) and in the home environment.

A field experiment was conducted to change current instructional methods in the classroom to cooperative, small-group teaching (SGT) instead of the whole-class, presentation-recitation method. Fifty teachers, constituting the majority of the staff in three elementary schools serving a lower class neighborhood in the larger Tel-Aviv, Israel area participated in this experiment which lasted more than 18 months. Findings revealed that: Implementation of SGT occurred during the second year of the project following eight months of workshops and the adoption of teacher self-help teams for monitoring classroom instructional performance. The experimental group registered a significant positive change on an attitude questionnaire indicating a more progressive and less controlling approach to teaching and to education in general. Implementers of small-group learning were found to be less conservative and more willing to take risks, more spontaneous and imaginative, more open to feelings, and more socially oriented than were teachers who did not implement the new methods in their classrooms. In intensive interviews conducted with all teachers, implementers of SGT expressed greater openness to educational innovations and a greater sense of being able to cope with problems in the classroom than teachers who did not implement the small-group approach.