Collaborative learning 2

It's been a week since term started and my classes began their collaborative learning journey as described during my Christmas break, in collaborative learning 1.  I feel, so far that it has added a creative element to my teaching and there is a lot of focussed energy in the room.  Collaboration has naturally coupled with individual work and some didactic teaching from me to give an all round more balanced feel to my classroom.

This post is all about what was confirmed, visualised and found out during the first week.

Post 1:  This is about how and why I will get my students collaborating.

Post 2:  My opinions on how it's going.

Post 3:  Will be my students thoughts on collaborative learning.

Post 4:  Will be about my preparations to deliver staff training.

Post 5:  This will be staff feedback and next steps.

Monday:  I blu-tacked small versions of the seating plan for each class (including my tutor group) onto the window of my classroom door which created an immediate buzz with each class and also got them talking about it before I had had to mention it.  I'm always impressed by how much more compliant and believing people are when something is written down 'in black and white' rather than when just spoken (think Daily Mail, think instructions in class).  

Predictably however, there have been about as many questions over the seating plans as there usually is.  I have stuck solidly to my stock answer which goes something like "Yes, that's a really good idea, I'm sure you would work much harder sat next to so and so, and we'll be reviewing the plan at Easter!". 

What has really happened then?  The team starters, team building and competition element has been brilliant.  I suppose you're always onto a winner there, everyone loves a bit of that.  I was surprised though, how well the team building opened up the classroom; we started to ask each other questions about anything you like/dislike and how many people agreed.  A style of teaching completely out of the ordinary for me but questions were coming up like 'do you have a big family?' which lead onto pastimes and hobbies and students taking a genuine interest in each other, stronger teams were built and the teams were a lot ore receptive to working on the science task with each other.  I found that with year 7 I was saying "right, the next game is. . . ."  and "one more game, and then we'll be ready for break" where games referred to book work, literacy tasks, and matching diagrams with descriptions.  

My task of the week with classes has been to take a set of questions which would normally be completed individually but get the teams to stick their answers onto an A3 sheet in an interesting manner of their choice with each team member tasked to complete the questions commensurate with their ability.  Then we check each others answers with the mark scheme and put them into our books.  Going round to each table, I awarded teams animal stickers rather than levels.  The animal stickers gave me chance to discuss their teamwork. So a spider meant that the team's work is a bit like the beginnings of a web but will come together beautifully and be very effective in the end.  A penguin meant they were working brilliantly as a team; just like penguins huddle together for the greater good, no one left out.  We also had lions, ladybirds, dogs and fish.

For the week ahead, I'm mostly excited about my deputies; I've noticed that having my strongest students in the same place on each team table in every class is allowing me to relay things to the rest of the class easier because I can easily remember where they are.  This is something I'm going to make much more use of, I know that having them on 'my side' will be invaluable because of the knock on effect with the rest of the students who are infinitely more influenced by their peers that the teacher. Fact! 


I also need to get each class to fill in a team work survey to evaluate the new approach.

Teachmeet Stoke-on-Trent

TeachMeet Stoke-on-Trent

So, why put on a teachmeet for Stoke?
After taking to Twitter as my Personal Learning Network (PLN) back in August 2013 and quickly becoming addicted to my daily diet of virtual teaching and learning, I soon wanted to go to a Teachmeet. 
PLN? Having a PLN is just using social media to 'follow' other users and be inspired by the ideas and activities they are using in their classroom. The beauty of it is that you can quickly see what your colleagues in the next classroom or across the world are doing and they will freely allow you to
share all of their best ideas.  If you want to contribute and share your original or old activities that work, then your PLN becomes a powerful tool for your own reflection, but you don't have to if you don't want!    A teachwhat?  A Teachmeet is FREE, informal and innovative continuing professional development (CPD), and the main thing is hearing stories about learning from teachers; real narratives of practice that have made a difference in the classroom.  You can find out about all the events which are going on in the country through this website.
The closest teachmeets I could find were in Birmingham with a lot of action in the south of England and Yorkshire.  You'll notice from the link above that their are a few closer to home; Stockport, Warrington, Blackpool and the Wirral all have events coming up in spring 2014.

They say you never forget your first Teachmeet and mine was  "Teachmeet Brum at Xmas"  which was exactly what it said on the tin.  There was christmas food, free raffle prizes, networking and most importantly some great CPD:  I even picked up a few ICT tips for example putting filetype: ppt or doc or pdf etc on the end of your google search term to bring up all the files of that type.  So typing in crude oil filetype: ppt will bring up a shed load of power points on crude oil


Teachmeet Stoke-on-Trent will kick off with a great keynote speaker followed by a series of seven-minute micro presentations, three-minute nano presentations and some fantastic free raffle prizes and refreshments at break-time with networking opportunities.

Collaborative learning

Collaboration    the action of working with someone to produce something. (OED)

Cooperation      the action or process of working together to the same end.  (OED)

This post is the first of five posts which will chart my learning journey as I go all out on collaboration with some of my teaching classes and tutor group.

Post 1:  This is about how and why I will get my students collaborating.

Post 2:  Will be my own opinions on how it's going.

Post 3:  Will be my students thoughts on collaborative learning.

Post 4:  Will be about my preparations to deliver staff training.

Post 5:  This will be staff feedback and next steps.

I've had the idea for quite a while and it stems from thoughts about how children learn best in my classroom.  Quite simply, we know that children understand best when they 'do' and 'create' for themselves.  My favourite part of the job is when I appear completely relaxed at the side, back or front of my classroom..  This is when I can observe learning in action; students explaining to each other, debating over the format for a word equation, the correct method to heat calcium carbonate or which should be the top drawback for using nuclear fuel.  It's great when the chatter and noise is all about keywords and students discussing the current topic.  You know when students are on task and you also know when they are squabbling over something which has happened before they even entered your classroom or what happened last night on FIFA, Facebook or Grand Theft Auto.  It's clear that there's an energy associated with both situations but it's the former scenario which tells us that there's creativity and learning happening in the room.  All of us have a natural desire to engage with our peers through discussion and it is this energy that I want to encourage, harness and combine with other forms of communication to create an engaging, fun and powerful learning environment where students are free to create and collaborate.

Besides having the idea for a while, the reason I got started is the Sutton Trust-EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit which I am grateful to one of my colleagues in the maths department for showing me.  It is a summary of research, providing guidance on how to improve attainment of disadvantaged pupils.  It has 33 topics and for each one the average impact on attainment (including the strength of evidence) and relative cost is shown.  The topics include:  Feedback, Learning styles, Peer tutoring, Behaviour interventions and Summer schools.  However, Collaborative learning caught my eye as one of the most beneficial for attainment yet cost effective options around.  I have included some important and interesting  information regarding collaborative learning from this research at the end of this post.*

My description in the first paragraph, of learners fully engaged and learning from each other is rare in reality and I want to increase the frequency of these moments and make them more sustained than just moments and I want to do it by remodelling the seating plan in the classroom and teaching the skills needed for collaboration through a cooperative learning approach.  I'm also going to be implementing marginal learning gains wherever I can.  http://marginallearninggains.com The causes of any small gain in learning outcomes will be identified and embedded as I go along.

The definitions of cooperation and collaboration are very similar as you will have noticed from the Oxford English Dictionary definitions the top of this page.  Kagan cooperative learning is widely used at the school where I work and I'll be using activities from the Kagan cooperative learning book.  However, I will be focusing on student collaboration  and the difference for me is that collaboration is happening when a community of learners are finding out information and understand things for themselves as opposed to cooperative learning which, for me, works best when learners have already been taught or given the content and are applying and practising the use of it.  By focusing on collaboration rather than cooperation, I want learners to learn from each other; I want learners of all ability levels to be empowered to help others.  So my idea is that we'll get collaborative learning when firstly, learners are in the Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky), meaning they can do the task but only with support, and secondly we have peers of lower, higher or similar ability empowered to help them.

So, my first job tomorrow, the first day of Spring term, is to share the new seating plans with my classes; they are heterogenous as far as possible along the lines of ability, sex and ethnic background.  I have to admit that I didn't stick rigidly to the seating plans I had in place back in September.  Very slowly they changed despite my knowledge that this should be one area of teaching with the least room for compromise.  Interestingly when I revisited the seating plans recently I noticed a very direct correlation between two things: 1) those students who had presented low level disruption so far this year and 2) those students who were not in the places set for them in September.  I was amazed at how very direct this correlation was and would never have noticed if I hadn't carefully rearranged the seating!  I will never let my carefully planned seating arrangements slip again! Hopefully not anyway.  How did I allow this to happen? The usual requests:  Sir, x is away today is it ok to just sit next to y for a today?  Of course, but remember to move back next time.  Sir, can I work with x just on this piece of work so you can see how well we work together?  Okay, just for this work and then please remember to move back to your seats at the start of the lesson when I will be way too busy trying to get the lesson off to a good start.

Once in our new seating arrangements, I will start each lesson with a fantastic team building exercise  (here is a version http://martinabex.com/2012/02/24/literary-team-windows/)  from Cooperative learning by Dr Spencer Kagan (section 8:4) where the team come up with their own team name by investigating their commonalities and uncommon commonalities.

My two initial steps into collaborative learning will then be firstly, to deliver existing teaching resources in the Co-op Jigsaw II format and secondly, to get teams using the team work self evaluation form  (19:13 and 19:8 respectively in the above mentioned book).  In theory the jigsaw format should allow learners to capitalise on the work of members of their own team as well as members of other teams.

If you're interested, you could google 'jigsaw cooperative learning' to find out much more, or even start with this great site  https://www.teachervision.com/group-work/cooperative-learning/48532.html. 

And finally, *Information from Sutton EEF research (collaborative learning)

What is it?

Collaborative or cooperative learning can be defined as learning tasks or activities where students work together in a group small enough for everyone to participate on a collective task that has been clearly assigned. This can be either a joint task where group members do different aspects of the task but contribute to a common overall outcome, or a shared task where group members work together throughout the activity. Some collaborative learning approaches also get mixed ability teams or groups to work in competition with each other, in order to drive more effective collaboration. There is a very wide a range of approaches to collaborative and co-operative learning involving different kinds of organisation and tasks, but this summary does not include Peer tutoring which is reviewed separately

How effective is it?

The impact of collaborative approaches on learning is consistently positive, but it does vary so it is important to get the detail right. Effective collaborative learning requires much more than just sitting pupils together and asking them to work together; structured approaches, with well-designed tasks lead to the greatest learning gains. There is some evidence that collaboration can be supported with competition between groups, but this is not always necessary, and can lead to learners focusing on the competition rather than the learning it aims to support. Approaches which promote talk and interaction between learners tend to promote the best gains. 

What do I need to know?

• Pupils will need support and practice to work together; this does not happen automatically.
• Tasks need to be designed carefully so that working together is effective and efficient, otherwise some pupils will try to work on their own.
• Competition between groups can be used to support pupils in working together more effectively within their group, though over-use of competition can focus learners on the competition rather than succeeding in their learning so it needs to be used cautiously.
• It is particularly important to encourage lower achieving pupils to talk and articulate their thinking in collaborative tasks as they may contribute less.
• Managing effective collaborative group work is challenging so professional development or collaborative professional inquiry is likely to be helpful to support effective use of these approaches.