Servant Teaching : Understanding the Effect of Cooperative Learning in a Servant-Led Classroom Environment

The trend in education today is servant teaching as an effective teaching and learning strategy from K to Adult levels. In my perspective as an educator, servant teaching (Noland & Richards, 2015) includes cooperation as in cooperative teaching/learning between teachers and learners in the classroom. Recent studies revealed the competency, pedagogical appropriateness, and effectiveness of cooperative learning. Johnson, Johnson, and Stanne (2000) conducted extensive reviews of research on the effectiveness in increasing achievement of the methods of cooperative learning used in schools. They found 164 studies investigating eight cooperative learning, and the studies yielded 194 independent effect sizes representing academic achievement (Johnson, Johnson, & Stanne, 2000). Not only mainstream and special education students can benefit from the use of cooperative learning but also diverse immigrant students in the United States. In this perspective, this reflection seeks to highlight the effectiveness of cooperative learning in a servant teaching environment in relation to students' positive outcomes in mathematics through participating in cooperative learning (CL) activities in the classroom. In doing this, (1) I share my own experience as a servant teacher, (2) define and explain servant teaching, (3) review literature on servant leadership (SL) and cooperation as an SL characteristic, (4) describe the frame of the CL review, (5) define cooperative learning, (6) explain the benefits of cooperative learning, (7) clarify the challenges to implementing cooperative learning, and (8) conclude on the topic