You remember this. You're in sixth grade, middle of the third row. The teacher stands in front of the chalk board and asks a question. If you know the answer, you don't just raise your hand—you practically leap out of your seat, waving your hand, reaching and groaning. Pick me, oh pick me, please!

This is what psychologist Elliott Aronson, an expert in the culture of the classroom, calls a "feeding frenzy." For the last thirty years, Aronson has been studying the social environment of classrooms. Often, he and his colleagues have found, schools operate under a social code based on identifying winners and losers, and excluding and ridiculing those who are perceived as different.

What if in that sixth grade classroom, you worked in a group for a few hours a day, cooperating with fellow students? What if your grade depended not only on your own performance—but also that of the quiet girl in the corner, or the boy who spoke English as a second language? What if instead of worrying only about your grades and the extracurricular activities that would help you get into college, you spent time learning to respect one another's unique contributions?

In Nobody Left to Hate: Teaching Compassion After Columbine (W.H. Freeman & Co., 2000), Aronson argues that the cliquish and exclusionary atmosphere that prevails in today's schools may have contributed to the pathological behavior of the teen shooters at Colorado's Columbine High School—in addition to that of other young people who have committed violent acts. To counter its effects, Aronson argues for a cooperative learning model called the "jigsaw classroom."

According to Aronson, the method fosters a social environment where students learn to like and respect one another, and where taunting and bullying are sharply reduced. "That's the kind of atmosphere we should be striving for, even if there were no killings in Columbine," Aronson says

I spoke with Aronson in preparation for a Connect for Kids e-mail chat on safe schools. He will moderate the discussion during the week of March 27, 2000.

Right now, people are anxiously looking for ways to keep children safe in school. But the social atmosphere in the classroom is not the most obvious place to look for answers. Why is it so important?

Right after the Columbine massacre, I tuned in to chat rooms where high school students were writing about the incident. It was a sobering experience—there were dozens of statements by kids who said that while they didn't condone what Harris and Klebold had done, they could understand how kids could be pushed over edge by the taunting that takes place in school.

Obviously anyone who picks up a gun and shoots someone in the kind of massacre that we saw at Columbine is demonstrating pathological behavior. But if we simply chalk it up to pathology, we're missing a major point.

There is something about what's going on at school that's pushing kids over the edge and making them angry with their fellow students? Columbine is not different from any other school—the atmosphere is pervasive.

When did you develop the "jigsaw classroom" approach?

I invented the structure in 1971 in Austin, Texas. That's when the schools were desegregated, and we [University of Texas social psychologists] were invited into a school to look at how we could improve relationships between students of different races.

What we saw was a highly competitive atmosphere. It was exacerbated by the fact that black and Mexican-American kids had been attending schools that were under-staffed, where teachers were not as well-trained, etc. So they were destined to lose, and this confirmed existing stereotypes. One result was a lot of taunting, pushing and shoving.

What did you do about it?

Intervention was simple: We broke each class down into five-person groups. Each student in the group received a note card with specific information about a topic—one piece of the larger puzzle. The students, in turn, must share their information with the group so that they can then collaborate on a project. The situation is specifically structured so that the only access any group member has to the information held by the other four is by listening intently to the other people's reports.

In a competitive classroom, when a kid who speaks English as a second language stumbles in front of the class, it's easy to make fun of him. But in a jigsaw classroom, it's in your own best interest to pay attention to that kid, to be patient and not put him down, so that you can get a good grade.

You're teammates now, not competitors. Not only do kids learn to like each other better and have empathy and compassion, but the level of prejudice goes down, absenteeism goes down, and they do better on objective exams. The whole atmosphere changes.

You estimate that this cooperative technique is used in maybe 5 to 10 percent of classrooms in this country. If it's so easy to learn, why isn't it more widespread?

My best guess is that, like everyone else, teachers do things in the way they were trained to do them, and most teachers have not been trained to use jigsaw. Some teachers may feel that, in this age of "back to basics," cooperative learning is simply a frill. Still others teachers may feel that they already are using some form of cooperative learning because they have occasionally placed their students in small groups, instructing them to cooperate.

Such loose, unstructured situations do not contain the crucial elements and safeguards that make the jigsaw and other structured cooperative learning strategies work so well. Our research shows that one hour per day of jigsaw in middle school and high school is all that is required to counter the exclusion and taunting produced by the excessive competition in adolescent years.

What can we do, as ordinary citizens, to improve the social environment of schools?

As citizens, we should be concerned about what's going on in classrooms. We should go to PTA meetings, talk to principals and teachers and see if we can try to introduce the elements of cooperative learning.

Teachers can learn how to learn the jigsaw approach in 1-day workshops. So we should encourage schools to send teachers to these workshops. Unless we can teach kids compassion and empathy for each other, we cannot solve the problem of school violence. Not with gun control, and not with metal detectors... The root of the problem is the atmosphere, and the atmosphere has not changed a lot since I was in school.

Try to imagine a woman or a minority being taunted and bullied in an office job today. That person would justifiably seek legal redress—and the courts would throw the book at the organization that tacitly allowed it to go on. Yet these things are common in our schools. Most administrators and teachers turn their back to what goes on and choose to ignore it, but the real skill is teaching students to appreciate one another.

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Join in the Connect for Kids e-chat on safe schools, moderated by Elliot Aronson, throughout the week of Mar. 27! Send an e-mail to subscribe-safeschools@connectforkids.org.

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Julee Newberger is assistant managing editor at Connect for Kids.