Collaborative Learning and Learning to Learn

Transcription

1 Collaborative Learning and Learning to Learn Steve Cooke City of Leicester The scene is an inner city primary school classroom in Leicester. All of the Year 6 class are from a variety of ethnic minority groups. All except three of them use English as an additional language. Languages used by the students include Kutchi, Gujarati and Somali. The students are sitting at tables in groups of four. In each group they are taking it in turns to pick up a card from a pile and examine it with the rest of the group. The card has a drawing of an angle on it. The student who has picked the card has to say whether she thinks the angle is an acute, right, obtuse or reflex angle. The student opposite her has to agree or disagree with her and provide a justification for agreeing or disagreeing. The other two students then also have to offer an opinion backed up by a justification. When they have reached agreement they place it on a board like the one below. While they are sorting the cards the students are saying things such as: I think it s an obtuse angle because it s more than 90 degrees. it can t be obtuse because it s less than a right angle. The teacher is sampling different groups listening in to what the students are saying. Sometimes she joins in the dialogue. What do you mean when you say the angle is smaller? Generally she is modelling and encouraging students to use appropriate terminology. 36

2 When they have finished sorting the cards, the students each draw three examples of each type of angle on an A4 sized version of the board. They all use protractors to draw their examples. When they have finished this task, they have a game to play. For this game they use two different coloured sets of the same cards that they had before. They also have a board like this: The students divide into two teams of two. One pair has the green cards and the other pair the red cards. The greens put their cards face down in a pile and take the top card. They then look for an appropriate place on the board. There are several possibilities and they quickly discuss where the best place is. The reds then take their turn. Both teams know that their aim is to get four of their cards in a row either horizontally, vertically or diagonally and to stop their opponents from achieving this. When deciding where to put the cards the students refer back to their recording chart, if necessary. What the teacher wants the students to be able to do by the end of the lesson is not just to remember a definition of each of the types of angles but also to understand the definitions and apply them to examples. But why doesn t the teacher just explain the definition and the criteria, question the students to build and check their understanding and give them a worksheet to complete? Why bother with this collaborative learning activity? A week later the same class are working on science. They are thinking about the names, locations and functions of the major organs in the human body. This time they are looking at a set of cards. Each card is the same size and has either a name, location or function of an organ or pair of organs. The activity therefore involves matching the correct location and the correct function to the correct name and placing them on a base board in the form of a table. One group has decided to sort through the cards and pull out all the name cards and then share these out amongst the group. They then take it in terms to show the rest of the group a name card and say where they think it is located. Others in the group then offer an opinion. They then begin scanning the location cards to see if there s a description of location which fits their idea (or ideas) of where it might be. When they have come to some agreement they start to think about the function of the 37

3 organ. As they work through the cards they sometimes go back and change something they have already decided in the light of some new information or on encountering something that doesn t quite fit: The liver must be wrong. We ve got it as cleaning the blood and getting rid of waste, but that s got to be the kidneys, isn t it? Yeh, but what does the liver do? It could be this one: to control the supply of various chemicals in the body and help with digestion. What does that mean? Well, it could be like... After some time the students have arranged all the cards on their table, had them checked for accuracy by a teacher and are now playing an enquire and eliminate game with each other. One student says I m thinking of an organ or a pair of organs. The other students take it in turns to ask questions which elicit yes or no answers about location or function in order to try to find out the identity of the organ(s). Following that the students are introduced to a game like activity to reinforce and consolidate their learning. It is a collection game. They have a board like this: The idea is that they take it in turns to roll a die and move their counter in any direction they choose. When their counter passes through a rectangle they can collect whatever organ is located there. In the rectangle is a description of location. 38

4 which From the description, they have to work out which organ (or pair) it is they can collect. In order to collect it the pupils have to record the name location and function in writing. They do this in the form of a sentence such as: Because I have... is / are located... I am able to... The aim of the game is to collect all or as many organs as you can in the allotted time and to see who has collected the most. Those who haven t collected all of them by the end of the game can fill in their missing organs with the assistance of those who have. These vignettes of classroom practice are not intended as exemplars of excellent practice. Indeed, I am sure that readers would be able to suggest refinements, adaptations or additions which would improve the nature of the activities and improve the quality of the students learning. However, what they do illustrate is a teacher s attempts to meet the linguistic, cognitive and affective needs of her students in a systematic and effective manner and to increase not only their knowledge but their capacity to learn. In other words, she is trying to introduce a significant element of learning to learn into their activities. But what exactly does this notion of learning to learn involve in practical terms? How are these learning activities illustrated here then enabling the students to acquire these particular skills and abilities? Language for Learning and Learning Language Firstly, the activities encourage an extensive use of language by the participants. In particular oral language is very much to the fore. The students are using talk to question, speculate, put forward tentative ideas for consideration, to clarify, to paraphrase and so on. In other words they are using language to explore and refine meaning. In this way language becomes a tool for thinking rather than a barrier to understanding. This form of questioning, tentative and provisional expression is essentially thinking out loud. Through this thinking out loud process, students have the opportunity to connect what they already know with what they are trying to understand. It is also helping them to move towards a more precise use of language to define, explain, state purpose etc. This precision includes the use of technical terms and also the linguistic structures which serve to state a variety of propositions. For example, in another maths activity a pupil s initial perception of a rhombus as It s like a squashed kind of a square. This has embedded within it notions that:. this shape is similar to a square in some way. this shape is different to a square in some way. Through collaborative exploratory activity the initial description explicit statement such as: can lead to a more This is a rhombus. It is similar to a square because it has four sides of equal length. However, it is different from a square in that is hasn t got angles of 90 degrees and has only got two lines of symmetry instead of four. This example also illustrates the way that students prior knowledge about a square is built upon in order to construct an understanding of the new shape. 39

5 Key Visuals Another feature of these activities is the use of visual or graphic organisers. In collaborative activities routine use is made of tables, charts, timelines, Venn diagrams, quadrants, branching diagrams etc. These graphical outlines act as base boards on which students place cards so as to recreate or complete a key visual. The key visual is effectively an information package which summarises the content to be learned. For example, the students working on the human organs were effectively completing a table. The year 5 class in the same school that week had been working out the progress of technological innovations and been placing invention cards on a skeleton timeline. The advantages of exploiting and getting students to work on these Key Visuals may be many and varied, but I think that there are three particular benefits: 1. The key visual provides making. a focus for the students discussion and decision 2. The key visual not only embodies the content to be learned (names, locations. functions) but also explicitly illustrates the structure of the content. This is not only useful for directing students attention to the structure of the knowledge they are engaging with at the time but also enables them to begin to see links between curriculum topics which at a surface level seem unrelated. Thus, the knowledge structure of the human organs (part, location, function) is mirrored in studying a Roman baths or a musical instrument. This increases the possibility that students become increasingly cued in to identifying the knowledge structures and types of thinking (classifying, cause and effect, comparing and contrasting, evaluating etc) necessary for engaging with different types of content across the curriculum. 3. A key visual can also serve to highlight patterns, inconsistencies and exceptions in the knowledge (verbs ending in -ve tend to form a noun by dropping the ve and adding -ution, the internal angles of all quadrilaterals add up to 360 degrees, the duck-billed platypus lays eggs, carbon dioxide does not have a liquid state, ice has a greater volume than water, etc.) This last point about patterns and inconsistencies is also interesting because the activity of reconstructing key visuals can encourage students to be more self-regulating. That is to say that students are often more aware that there is something wrong with their initial ideas because the key visual doesn t work. They then seek to rectify the problem so that the re-constructed key visual makes sense. Socially Constructed Learning and Learning as a Social Activity These activities also promote the idea that learning is primarily a social activity. The students are learning with and from each other. The social nature of the activities is not merely a nice thing but is a crucial component of learning to learn. Even the lone student sitting with a book is essentially engaging in a dialogue with someone else even though the author may be at some distance in space and time. To compensate for the inability of the author to respond to requests for clarification, further exemplification or justification of a point, the reader has to construct a kind of interior dialogue which questions and probes the nature of the information presented to them. However, for students this maintenance of an interior dialogue is difficult 40

6 and it is much easier to do this out loud with others who can contribute to the dialogue. This view of learning is also consistent with Vygotsky s assertion that intellectual and linguistic development proceed from the social plane to individual consciousness through a process of internalisation. In summarising Vygotsky s view Wood (1998 ) says: Social interaction and such experiences as talking to, informing, explaining, being talked to, being informed and having things explained structure not only the child s immediate activities but also help to form the processes of reasoning and learning themselves. The child not only inherits local knowledge about given tasks but gradually internalises the instructional process itself. Thus he learns how to learn, reason and regulate his own physical and mental activities. The social nature of this learning process is not only significant for cognitive reasons but also for its potential for influencing the affective climate of the classroom. In order to benefit from the opportunity to learn together the students need not only to have good intentions when working with others but they also need to acquire the communication skills to handle the interactions. Thus active listening, turn-taking, paraphrasing, including, encouraging and other skills become important ingredients in enabling the students to work together productively. These skills do not just happen when the students are put into a group and so the teacher has worked hard at modelling skills and drawing students attention to the need to use them. Of course it takes time to develop skills and the students are still learning to employ them effectively, but even at this stage there is a positive and supportive climate in which students show consideration for each other and are prepared to help one another with their learning. This of course allows for elements of peer support and tutoring within the activities and for students to engage in that very effective form of learning something, that is, having to explain it to someone else. This concern with learning to learn seems to me to deserve strong consideration when discussing any notions of school effectiveness and improvement. The focus on levels of attainment, while surely necessary, seems to have encouraged a cramming culture in which the answer to raising standards is defined in terms of more time and pressure. Thus more homework, booster classes, extended school days, testing, target groups and so on result in a kind of call to keep on what you re doing only do it more efficiently, harder and faster. Real consideration of what makes learning more effective and generates the generic capacity of students to learn seems to be absent from much of the literature and discussion. Tests may require factual recall and answering comprehension questions but it doesn t necessarily mean that training students in a narrow range of skills is the only or indeed the best way in the long term to prepare them for future learning. Cummins (1996) points out that: Our economy increasingly requires people with symbolic analysis skills who are capable of collaborative critical inquiry, but we still insist that schools get back to basics (as though they ever left). David Hopkins, in a speech at a conference in Leicester in December 2000, made reference to the experience of the Durham School Board, Toronto. He said that several years back the teachers had received a good deal of training in co-operative learning strategies. Having implemented these strategies, four years down the line it was apparent that not only were the pupils working collaboratively but also the 41

7 teachers were. A further four years down the line it was evident that the schools were now collaborating. The net result of these developments was a dynamic efficacy and continuous improvement. sense of This example suggests the potential for collaborative learning strategies to influence the climate for learning not only within individual classrooms but also to create the conditions for teachers to increase their capacity for learning to learn and developing their role as reflective practitioners. It seems to me that the use of collaborative learning strategies encourages teachers to observe their students actions and evaluate the nature of their learning. At the same time this focus often leads teachers to value professional dialogue with others both so that they can share and compare their observations. In turn a climate of open professional dialogue supports teachers in collaborating on the analysis and design of learning activities. This collaborative culture, if valued and exploited, offers the possibility that school improvement becomes more something which is done by teachers rather than something done to teachers. Fullan (1990) makes this link between classroom-focused teacher collaboration and school improvement more specific. He proposes a framework in which improvements in classroom management, strategies, skills and content are linked to the basic features of school improvement, defined as shared purpose, norms of collegiality, norms of continuous improvement and supportive structures. According to Fullan, the link is realised by the ability of teachers to develop the generic capacity to master new instructional models, to be reflective practitioners, to conduct constant inquiry and to be collaborative as a way of working. This capacity is defined as the teacher as learner. From a class of students collaborating to learn science and maths, to teachers collaborating on materials and methods, to schools collaborating on policies and systems is a long journey, but one that promises to produce learners who learn to learn, teachers who reflect on and improve their practice and schools which have the capacity to sustain their own development and success as educational communities. Steve Cooke can be contacted at steve.cooke References Cummins J (1996) Negotiating identities: Education for empowerment in a diverse society. Ontario: CABE Fullan M (1990) Staff development, innovation and institutional development. In B. Joyce (ed) Changing school culture through staff development. Virginia: ASCD Wood D (1998) How children think and learn. Oxford: Blackwell 42