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B. The Implementation of Actions
1. Report of Cycle 1
The first cycle of this research was divided into three meetings as the researcher still needed to give the students some integrated materials as well as
some practice. Cycle one was conducted starting from January 31
st
, February 06
th
, to February 07
th
, 2015.
a. Planning
1 Implementing Cooperative Learning
As the researcher considered difficulties in generating ideas to be the main problem, she would focus greatly on solving it which, in this case, was by using
cooperative learning method. There were some structures which usually be used to facilitate cooperative learning but the researcher had decided that she would use
Student Team Achievement Division STAD instead as it hopefully would give such an equal improvement among this group of students who had different levels
of writing skills. Applying STAD would be quite easy as long as the researcher already
acquired the pre-test scores for those would be used to understand the students’
basic writing skills. After getting the data, the researcher needed to pay attention to how the groups would be formed as she could not do it randomly.
It was also really important that she made sure each group got 1-2 students with above-average writing skills in it as this was the essential key to an effective
Student Team Achievement Division STAD that would lead to a greater result in solving the research problems.
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In this case, there were several steps that the researcher had to go through in order to form the groups. First, she needed to conduct the writing pre-test and
collect the required data. After that, it was necessary for the researcher to understand the students’ basic writing skills that could be seen through the pre-test
results. Next, she had to rank the students based on those results. The following step was to take ten students with the lowest scores and ten
students with the highest scores and divided them into ten groups which would make each group consist of one student with poor writing skills and one student
with good writing skills. The rest of the students with average writing scores would randomly not sequentially based on the existing rankings be placed into
those ten groups that had already been formed. It was important to put the student with above-average writing skills in a
group with students that had average and especially below-average writing skills as the researcher could give the student with better writing skills responsibilities
to “teach” their friends and help them throughout the process of learning writing. However, the researcher also set a rule that forbade those students with better pre-
test scores to do all the writing tasks by themselves just because they could. They all were required to work in groups and no exception.
Another thing that would also make a great deal of difference was to make students with the lowest pre-test scores in each group do all the writing for every
writing task as the researcher realized that sometimes incompetency came from laziness. It was also said that one would remember better by writing things down.
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