When someone says "group work", there are common reactions - students who usually end up doing all the work cringe; students who are adept at riding on coat tails smile; teachers who struggle with how to measure and assess student contributions worry about accountability.
My early attempts at resolving these problems included something called "Co-operative Learning", in which tasks were structured in specific ways and students took on assigned roles in order to achieve a group goal. While I did see some benefits to this approach, I also saw limitations, primarily around student agency. Being assigned the role of "recorder" or "reader" did not always play to a student's strengths and a group could become bogged down if group members were unhappy with their assigned roles. There was a level of falsity or "schoolness" to the format.
We then moved to flexible groupings which were more responsive to the needs of learners. If through reading student work it was discovered that 5 students did not understand an element of a task, those students would be brought together so that the misconception could be resolved. Often this would be done with the support of the Learning Resource teacher. I would explain the need and then send that small group for assistance.
Collaborative Inquiry requires learners to work together to solve a problem, complete a project or find answers to their personal questions within the boundaries of the curriculum and then create something which demonstrates learning. With Collaborative Inquiry, however, there is still the issue of individual accountability.
There is also an issue that I was not aware of until now - that in order for innovative solutions to problems to be found, it is important that there be distance between group members.
Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our World for the Better,
p. 164
It became very clear to me. Groups often end up with "group think" and tend to go with the ideas and decisions of the quickest thinker or the most dominant member of the group who then ends up feeling used because he or she has done all the work. Quieter students who need more time to reflect and process can lose their voices in groups. How one structures the collaborative process is key to reaching "idea diversity".
I decided to test this out. At our last PD day our school made an enormous cultural shift. We had a very rich discussion that led to a vision of our school where everyone is now a teacher and a learner. This had been happening intermittently in other classes. Sheila Ashcroft-Shupe regularly has grade 8 students teach dance to younger students, our grade 4 teacher, Kelly Dunford has had her students teach a math lesson to another class. We have reading buddies. Teachers say that they learn a great deal from students, but there has never been a cultural norm where students and adults see ourselves as people learning together. This is new.
In light of that discussion I decided to give my students the task of teaching younger students how longitude and latitude works. I was not, however, prepared to teach longitude and latitude to my students. They would have to learn it on their own. Normally, I would put students into groups or have students self-select groups so that they could begin discussing the task. This time, I didn't do that. Students have no idea who their group members will be. First they must work individually to understand the topic so that when groups are finally formed each person will have information and ideas to bring to the table.
They had a few days to construct knowledge and on Friday we discussed the process. Students love the idea that everyone will be coming to the group with some level of understanding and will have something to contribute. They recognized that if they were in a group where someone already understood longitude and latitude, they would not have to bother to learn it. They also acknowledged that there was less socializing and time wasting because they were working on their own.
They did, however, see a problem with efficiency. Having everyone learn the same information ahead of time is in some ways a waste of time. It would be beneficial to have different group members research different aspects of the problem and then share that knowledge with the group. When we come together next week, we'll see if we can discover a way to balance the need for individual processing and expediting that process.
Next week we will hold a Knowledge Building Circle. Students will share what they learned, build on each other's ideas and hopefully, clear up misconceptions. Only then will students move into groups so that they can begin planning how they will teach what they have learned to younger students. To do that they will be using the Avocado Model. They will have to sift through the groups' information to identify essential information that they feel a grade 4 student should know about longitude and latitude.
This post has generated discussion on twitter. The video below came via Jared Bennett
My early attempts at resolving these problems included something called "Co-operative Learning", in which tasks were structured in specific ways and students took on assigned roles in order to achieve a group goal. While I did see some benefits to this approach, I also saw limitations, primarily around student agency. Being assigned the role of "recorder" or "reader" did not always play to a student's strengths and a group could become bogged down if group members were unhappy with their assigned roles. There was a level of falsity or "schoolness" to the format.
We then moved to flexible groupings which were more responsive to the needs of learners. If through reading student work it was discovered that 5 students did not understand an element of a task, those students would be brought together so that the misconception could be resolved. Often this would be done with the support of the Learning Resource teacher. I would explain the need and then send that small group for assistance.
Collaborative Inquiry requires learners to work together to solve a problem, complete a project or find answers to their personal questions within the boundaries of the curriculum and then create something which demonstrates learning. With Collaborative Inquiry, however, there is still the issue of individual accountability.
There is also an issue that I was not aware of until now - that in order for innovative solutions to problems to be found, it is important that there be distance between group members.
Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our World for the Better,
p. 164
It became very clear to me. Groups often end up with "group think" and tend to go with the ideas and decisions of the quickest thinker or the most dominant member of the group who then ends up feeling used because he or she has done all the work. Quieter students who need more time to reflect and process can lose their voices in groups. How one structures the collaborative process is key to reaching "idea diversity".
I decided to test this out. At our last PD day our school made an enormous cultural shift. We had a very rich discussion that led to a vision of our school where everyone is now a teacher and a learner. This had been happening intermittently in other classes. Sheila Ashcroft-Shupe regularly has grade 8 students teach dance to younger students, our grade 4 teacher, Kelly Dunford has had her students teach a math lesson to another class. We have reading buddies. Teachers say that they learn a great deal from students, but there has never been a cultural norm where students and adults see ourselves as people learning together. This is new.
In light of that discussion I decided to give my students the task of teaching younger students how longitude and latitude works. I was not, however, prepared to teach longitude and latitude to my students. They would have to learn it on their own. Normally, I would put students into groups or have students self-select groups so that they could begin discussing the task. This time, I didn't do that. Students have no idea who their group members will be. First they must work individually to understand the topic so that when groups are finally formed each person will have information and ideas to bring to the table.
They had a few days to construct knowledge and on Friday we discussed the process. Students love the idea that everyone will be coming to the group with some level of understanding and will have something to contribute. They recognized that if they were in a group where someone already understood longitude and latitude, they would not have to bother to learn it. They also acknowledged that there was less socializing and time wasting because they were working on their own.
They did, however, see a problem with efficiency. Having everyone learn the same information ahead of time is in some ways a waste of time. It would be beneficial to have different group members research different aspects of the problem and then share that knowledge with the group. When we come together next week, we'll see if we can discover a way to balance the need for individual processing and expediting that process.
Next week we will hold a Knowledge Building Circle. Students will share what they learned, build on each other's ideas and hopefully, clear up misconceptions. Only then will students move into groups so that they can begin planning how they will teach what they have learned to younger students. To do that they will be using the Avocado Model. They will have to sift through the groups' information to identify essential information that they feel a grade 4 student should know about longitude and latitude.
This post has generated discussion on twitter. The video below came via Jared Bennett
Other links sent to add to the discussion.
From @brendasherry http://theconstructionzone.wordpress.com//?s=journal+zone
From @s3bertran the work on information asymmetry by noble economist Joseph Stiglitz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stiglitz and his speech on learning societies. http://live.worldbank.org/conversation-joseph-stiglitz-president-obama-council-jobs-and-competitiveness
Awesome post. Indeed it is an area of great interest to me as you might gather from following the link that Brenda provided - http://theconstructionzone.wordpress.com//?s=journal+zone. :-)
ReplyDeleteHeidi, I am interested in how you run your Knowledge Building Circles. Would love to know how you scaffold deep cognitive conversations that move kids from knowledge telling into knowledge transformation and the like!
thx
Peter
Thank you Peter for your encouragement. Using knowledge building circles are new to me and I am learning and refining. My attention was first drawn to their usefulness by Richard Messina at the Jackman Lab School http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/ics/ which you probably are familiar within, given its connection to OISE. Right now I am teaching students to use language builds the knowledge of the group. We are practising building on each others' ideas. Students are learning to say, " ... to build on .......'s idea ...." We are also practising the language of "Yes... and" rather than, "Yes ... but". At the start of the year, because we are working on social interactions for knowledge construction and collaborative work, our sharing is mainly oral. Eventually we will move to a digital tool, once students have a better understanding of how to comment on other people's ideas.
DeleteHi Ms. Siwak,
ReplyDeleteMy name is Keri Brown. I am a student at the University of South Alabama and I am currently enrolled in the course EDM 310. I am majoring in Elementary Education and this course is teaching us how to incorporate different uses of technology in the classroom. We are doing a lot of blogging and commenting in this course. I found your post very interesting and I think the information will be useful to me in my future teaching career. We are doing a lot of collaborative group work in EDM310 and I want to incorporate this in my classroom as well. I like the idea of Knowledge Building Circles to get your students involved and talking about what they have learned and found through research.
Thank you,
Keri