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.