The first day of the Childrens Cooperative Reflection Workshop, at the Indian Social Institute on Lodhi Road was a new, quite pleasant experience for me. I had never been to a workshop before where I was the "bhaiya" and the children look up to me for help and guidance. Well of course in school I had been called a bhaiya by my juniors, but it seemed more of an obligation for them, since the age gap was a few months at most.

Reaching the hall, seeing all the tables with charts, pencils, diaries and the variety of children sitting, I was a bit taken aback. I was looked at by the children, examined thoroughly from the ends of my hair to the toes of my boots. And the gazes immediately returned back to either their companions or Chandan, the anchor for the event, a middle aged man, probably a senior employee of the Butterflies organization.

Not that being senior really matters here, all employees are given the same amount of respect and validity of opinion.

Being late, I lost the privilege of watching the culmination of the events which led to the children sitting at their round tables, in diverse teams, cooperating to complete participatory activities and exercises given by the facilitators.

But I do know that once they were brought to ISI, they were given chits in order to sort them randomly. Each table had a random assortment of children from different contact points, and they were of different age too. This was the desired outcome of the chit-table method, grouping children with the help of names of animals like "elephant", "rabbit", "fox", "cow", "cat" and a few more.

Not all children were merry with their seating. A few of them exchanged or changed their positions in order to sit with friends more familiar to them.

"What is cooperative learning? how is it important to you, your family and the community?" were some of the questions worded a bit differently on a whiteboard. Children answered these with the help of each other on chart papers. They would then read out these answers. Some groups would answer with honesty, if they had any experience with cooperative learning. They'd mention the examples of how its important for the children to work together and learn from each other, and its easy to be comfortably learning through the medium of friends but not through the teachers of schools, who might scold.

The children who didn't have exposure of cooperative learning and instead were limited to being educated through educators at the contact point and the school teachers, had unconvincing and generic responses in their charts.

It wasn't their fault at all. If children are not given the autonomy to take responsibility and use their time with efficacy, and learning from their peers, the educator is underestimating the intellect of a critically aware child, hampering the potential learnings he/she might extract from dialogue and discussion.

The first three days of the workshop were focused on the Cooperative Learning part of the Cooperatives.

Cooperative learning, as I learnt from the slideshow on which Rita Panicker spoke was that its a method of learning, involves 5 steps, its systematic, and helps any group of people to learn from each other.

In the first stage of the process the learners form a circle, sitting such that if one speaks, every other person can see and hear. This is forming a circle of speakers. Next, they would pair and switch, two people pairing with each other and then exchanging their study material. Next, they would ask each other questions. The assigned summarizer would sum up the study session, learnings and everything else. The assigned reflector however will highlight the strengths, weaknesses, actual happenings of the session and reflect upon it all in order for a better cooperative learning session next time.