Issues raised for students

Issues Raised for Students in Implementing Collaborative Learning (CL)
Readers Comments...

Subject: Difficulties encountered by those implementing CL techniques
From: whiteley@mathstat.yorku.ca (Walter Whiteley)

We (Pat Rogers and I) are in the first stages of a project to encourage use of study groups / collaborative learning in the Mathematics and Statistics courses here at York.

After a public session to encourage people to think about that option (the usual information about improved student retention and satisfaction), we spent part of the summer preparing some handouts for students, and for teachers, on forming and supporting out of class study groups (that is where the initial interest is) as well as in class collaborative learning. [These handouts included a few attributed quotes from previous discussions on STLHE-L, including some of yours. We hope to get these onto the Web in the next few months.]

Interestingly, one 'change' which encourages instructors to form study groups and accept group assignments for out of class work is also a factor which discourages them from trying in class collaborative learning: classes are getting bigger and support (including marking) is getting smaller! People will consider group assignments because that means less marking time. It is easier (at least initially), to imagine collaborative learning in a class of 10, 20, even 30, that a class of 140 in a room that holds 140, with fixed chairs and 'benches'. I am currently struggling with a class of 30-35 in a classroom of 80 nailed down chairs and tablets for writing. I want to work with groups of four, and it is awkward.

One other thought, about student's resistance. Some of the excellent students in high school were forced to do 'group projects' but in fact they worked and others went along for the ride. Group work may not be collaborative and can be done badly (like lecturing can be). Over the summer, I witnessed a number of conversations between two strong students (both of whom are now in my class and both of whom were doing summer research - in a team setting). It is clear that there is deep scepticism. One was convinced by the very process of reading material and preparing the handouts on study groups! The other - we will see.

Finally, something that is scary for students and faculty alike: the switch to collaborative learning in subjects like math is almost certainly tied with a switch in the cognitive level of the demands: more open-ended problems, more conceptual work, less memorisation and calculation. An assignment requiring a lot of writing in math, with multiple 'good' answers, is scary for the students. It would be impossible without collaborative techniques, but the shift in the kind of work is also intimidating and is associated, for the student and the teacher, with the shift in classroom form (from lecturing to collaborative in class techniques).

It is an interesting 'thought experiment' to imagine shifting the kinds of assignments and evaluation (which we say we want) and realising the pressure that would build to shift to group work and collaborative learning. Perhaps on of the strategies for encouraging group work is the get an agreement on the goals and then realise that a shift is essential to realising those goals with most of our students.

Subject: Difficulties encountered by those implementing CL techniques
From: hsitler@westol.com (Helen Sitler)

My first response is that it's not only teachers who are reluctant to try collaborative methods. Students who've experienced largely teacher-centred classrooms are reluctant, too. Student resistance is, I believe, one reason for why instructors try collaborative learning and then drop it.

It's interesting that you're finding the most distrust among science and engineering instructors. On the job don't their students have to collaborate frequently? It would seem to me a worthwhile skill to cultivate if one's future job depends on the ability to get along and get it done together.

Subject: Difficulties encountered by those implementing CL techniques
From: Jeff Driggs

Let me begin by thanking Ted Panitz for initiating this discussion of collaborative learning. I'm a part-time instructor of freshman writing (Honors 200: Intensive Writing) and, until this semester, have used collaborative learning very little. When I began teaching three years ago, I learned that most of the other Honors 200 teachers assigned one essay each semester as a collaborative paper, so I did, also, but that was about as far as I went. And at the time, I had never heard the term "collaborative learning."

One reason I would submit that teachers don't use collaborative learning more is that students don't like it--if it's not presented right. I heard nothing but complaints about those collaborative papers. As honors students, they had very high academic standards, were very competitive, and greatly resisted relinquishing any part of their grade to a group effort. It seemed like they had all had negative experiences working with groups in high school--most of them claimed they had ended up doing the majority of the work. And they felt their grades always suffered because of them. I found in practice that the papers were, indeed, not of the calibre I was used to getting from the students individually. They were generally about rough-draft quality, because by the time the groups had gotten that far, they were so sick of working together that they didn't want to put any more effort in, as a group. Sometimes someone from the group would take it upon herself (or have foisted upon her)--and it was, generally, a "her," to compile and retype the whole thing alone, so that one person would attempt to bring it up to her standards using her style. These were better papers, but were not purely collaborative efforts.

And of course, occasionally, there were problems with severe disagreements or students who failed to do their share of the work. How do you handle that as a teacher? How do you avoid "punishing" the ones who do their work, but the whole is not very good? For the most part, I had to throw out of consideration uncharacteristically lower grades on collaborative papers when assigning the final grade for each student. I reassured myself that the opportunity for them to work together was worth the effort, even if the written result wasn't up to par. In fact, however, because of my students' resistance, I may very well have given up on the idea, had I not learned about true collaborative learning, the benefits of it, and some techniques for doing it right. But those are topics for future discussions.

Subject: Difficulties encountered by those implementing CL techniques
From: bogert@champlaincollege.qc.ca (Sherry Bogert)

I agree with Rex Campbell [see Issues raised for teachers]. I tried to do some collaborative learning sessions in a "lecture" class of 400+ students. Students were placed into groups and for about five consecutive classes they were given activities to work on for part of the hour session. The structure of the room made discussion prohibitive, and the noise in the room was distracting. Many of the students hated the trial and so I discontinued it. I thought that it might not be possible to start such a format part way through the semester.

The following semester, I once again tried a co-operative/collaborative learning approach, starting with the very first class. The class was much smaller with a registration of about 150 students. It was a second year physiology course, primarily for nursing students. There was a mutiny after the third class, with 60 students signing a petition to say that they didn't want this new format, and that I should do lectures only. I spent the weekend mulling over their request and asked for their patience and co-operation, as I intended to continue with the format. Attendance dwindled as the semester progressed, however a few students were very enthusiastic with this format, and maintained that they learned a lot.

On a more positive note, I have tried this approach with much smaller groups(up to 40 students)and have found it to work well in Biology courses with students in science and non-science programs. In one class that had about 50 students, again the noise became prohibitive, and I needed to move several groups to another room to reduce the din.

Subject: The advantages to students of using collaborative techniques
From: sgawilk@umslvma.umsl.edu (Gayle A. Wilkinson)

Three separate comments for you:

1. I have convinced my undergraduate and graduate students to use collaborative learning through constructing my college courses so that much collaboration occurs through various levels and projects. This seems to work much better than telling them to do it themselves.
2. I am working with professors from the Arts and Science College to get professors together with those from the School of Education to teach interdisciplinary courses and hopefully some new techniques can be exchanged.
3. I attended a Wakonse Conference in Michigan with other professors from many areas and disciplines. Many are discovering collaborative learning.

Subject: The advantages to students of using collaborative techniques
From: hallenc@jkhbhrc.byu.edu (Cynthia Hallen)

I have found that collaborative learning works best for in-class practice activities that are not graded, or for out of class study sessions for exams. Collaborative learning does not seem to be as much of a challenge as collaborative evaluation. It may be that people want to learn together in groups, but they want to be judged as individuals, as in life.

Subject: The advantages to students of using collaborative techniques
From: mccomas@marshall.edu (Karen McComas)

I found in the local school supply store, some great workbooks in the elementary and middle school sections with ideas about activities for developing team identities, using collaborative activities, etc. I just geared them up for the appropriate age level, the concepts were the same. On an interesting note, I'm in Communication Disorders and we train folks who want to be Speech Pathologists, so we spend lots of time working with children....once my students discovered my sources for ideas...they urged me to use the worksheets, etc. right out of the workbooks....they thought if fun to have the cute cartoons, etc. Another aspect I would like to mention is the "mutiny" that a previous commenter mentioned. From my own experience and from what I have read, that is not uncommon. Collaborative learning is scary to students....and remembering that they want to do well, makes the mutiny a bit easier for me to take. I think you suggestion to them that this was an "experiment" is a wise one. Hang in there....students don't need you to stand in front of them and tell them what they are able to read....they need you there to expand upon the readings, explain the difficult concepts, demonstrate applicability, etc. Good luck!

I agree that collaborative learning is scary for students and some will resist but I do not believe that telling them it is an experiment is a good idea. In my experience that makes them even more nervous. If we are to face reality, everything we do in the classroom is an experiment which we are not sure is going to work with every student. But talking about education as an experiment makes them very upset. We should avoid the use of the word. Tell them that it is an opportunity to learn more, to learn important skills which they will need in the working world--anything but an "experiment".

Subject: The advantages to students of using collaborative techniques
From: sjacobs@arnie.pec.brocku.ca (Sharon Jacobson)

Louis Schmier recently wrote "I can think "what to do" with my brain, but it's my heart which says, "take a chance. Go ahead," and it's the faith in my soul which drives and directs me by saying "it's the right thing to do, play with it if need be, stay with it if it works, discard it if it doesn't."

When I first joined this list five years ago, I had never taught in higher education and came seeking help and advice. I have finally begun my first appointment at Brock University in St. Catharine's, Ontario. And in my first few weeks here I have taken a lot of chances with my students, always listening to my heart and combining my passion about what I teach with my knowledge about the topic. The other night we were learning about the power of language and sensitive terminology. The students were frustrated with the books approach and they could not understand what the big deal was. "If a person can't see, then a person can't see. Who cares whether you call them a blind person or a person who is blind. Why were people so upset about what they were called." I had them do an exercise in class that I was not sure would work but it did and made an impact on them that they has carried into their other classes. Working in groups of about 10, these 120 students made up a list of anything they have ever said to anybody that might be considered disrespectful, insensitive, or offensive. After a few minutes I had those hand picked people come down and write some of the words/phrases that their group had come up with .

The class continued to laugh but more out of discomfort than fun. The people coming down would write the words down on the overhead and read them out loud. After all the groups were done, drawing from the words/phrases that they had compiled, I developed a list of words that had been said to or about me. Not one student laughed. As we talked about the shifts in their reactions, they became more aware of how easy it is to offend someone without knowing it, and the impact that language can have on someone's life. One student at the end of class said "I guess I will never know how many people I have kept from being my friends because of the disrespectful and insensitive way I have spoken to them."

Sharon Jacobson
Brock University Dept of Leisure and Recreation Studies
Catherine's, Ontario L0S 1K0

Subject: Memorisation vs interactive participatory learning
From: hmwkhelp@scott.net (Rick Garlikov)

Ted, please give an example of something that is better learned under a collaborative learning method than some other way.

I disagree that the cause of not using collaborative learning techniques is that most material "taught" today involves memorisation. Even if all the material required understanding, rather than memorisation, working through material to understand it still requires individual, often patient, effort. Someone remarked once that "We teach kids in groups, but learning is an individual activity"; there is a sense in which I agree with that. So I am assuming you have something in mind other than that kind of effort by the individual.

Subject: Memorisation vs interactive participatory learning
From: hodgesd@lanecc.edu (Daniel L Hodges)

[In response to Rick Garlikov - see above]

Rick Garlikov's comment on collaborative learning reminded me of an old social psychology finding. There's a phenomenon called "social facilitation" (Floyd Allport's phrase, I believe) whereby people's performance of a skill they have learned thoroughly gets better when they do it in front of an audience. Think of sports. And if they are trying to learn something or explore new behaviors or gently practice a fragile new cognitive or physical skill, then the presence of others facilitates cruder behavior because the skills are not well learned. Since their natural tendency is to make mistakes, other people would facilitate mistakes.

In social psych books it led to the recommendation to study alone and learn your material thoroughly and then take the test in front of a watching crowd. If you haven't learned the material well, just half-way, the presence of others will inhibit your performance.

Anyway, there must be two effects of collaborative learning. One that promotes discovery of ideas, talking, energising your willingness to work and so on. And a second effect that inhibits practice, damages exploration of how a cognitive skill generalises to new cases or discriminates between deceptively similar cases. If the social facilitation principle applies in general, then the wise instructor should provide social support for one phase of learning and provide blessed privacy and freedom from fear of being evaluated while the person builds up skill.

How does that sound?

Subject: Memorisation vs interactive participatory learning
From: tcc-l@uhccvm.its.hawaii.edu

Andrew Petto [see Issues raised for teachers] recently quoted a student's description of how she learned the Kreb's cycle in a recent class... "Oh, I don't remember a thing about it; and I never really understood it, but I was essential for me to memorise all the steps to pass the exam and the course, so I did."

Andrew, Possibly I'm missing something from your message or maybe I read it too fast, but in my experience as a biology student and instructor, many if not most students survive college-level science classes in this way. The sheer volume of material covered in most college-level science classes coupled with a semester system that divides students' attention among many different classes promotes memorisation/regurgitation behaviour. I didn't begin to understand the Kreb's cycle until I started teaching it. Participation in massive biology sections at a state school didn't promote deep understanding of critical concepts. I too survived by memorising cycles etc. that I didn't truly understand. At least the memorisation did plant kernels of knowledge that did sprout when I had to teach the subject later on.

This is a question that I've struggled with for a long period of time. How do you convey difficult technical topics in a manner that students can understand in the brief time allotted during a semester class? Your technique of discussing the effects of poisons on the cycle sounds wonderful. Attention grabbers really cause things to stick in students' minds.

Subject: Memorisation vs interactive participatory learning
From: fmcbh@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Annette Gourgey)

I'm looking forward to your series on CL. I have some reflections that are somewhat peripherally related to the reasons for reluctance listed in your post, but which may have some relevance.

I wrote you some time in the summer about my impending meeting with the stats committee at Manhattan Community College to develop projects. It has gone better than I anticipated. I've been meeting with the chair and have essentially become a new member. She has been very interested in my ideas for projects that involve students in applied statistics as it is practised by professionals in business and social sciences, rather than projects that focus on theoretical mathematical exercises without applications. The students are almost exclusively taking it for majors like business, social service, and health sciences; out of 120 students I've met so far, only one has been a math major. Thus the emphasis on applications rather than theory.

What has struck me in meeting with this professor is that although she is interested in new ideas, her conception of math and statistics is extremely narrow. She is so steeped in the minutiae of her subject (she has a masters in statistics as well as a doctorate in math) that she doesn't see the "big picture." She appears not to have a clear idea of why statistics is important to learn, how it is used in the non-theoretical world, or what her broad instructional objectives are. For example, whereas I will start the first class with a discussion of what is statistics and how is it used in many different professions, she will start them the first day with summation notation. When we discuss topics, she focuses on *how* to do it and will ask me *why,* as though she is herself not clear on the purpose. She has a lot of difficulty designing the part of the assignment that asks students to summarise and interpret their calculations.

I guess my point is that a major lesson for me in experimenting with CL was that you have to be very clear on the broad context of learning your subject and on what you feel is important for students to learn--both important content and important reasons for learning it. If you're not sure of your purpose, or of the larger framework that you want students' subject-matter learning to fit into, you will have a very difficult time knowing how to structure CL experiences so that students find them purposeful and useful. I fear that professors are so intimately involved with their subject that they take it too much for granted and have stopped asking these broader questions which would put them back in touch with the perspective of the novice student just entering the field. When they are so involved with the trees that they can't see the forest, about all they can do is lecture on what is, to them but not to the students, self-evident. And the gap between teacher and student remains wide.

A student who is repeating the course told me last week that she thinks that if her previous teacher had made statistics so understandable, she would not have failed it the first time. This is not only about CL but about having the context and the objectives clear. But what makes using CL different from lecturing is that it forces you to examine what you are really trying to get students to learn, why, and how *they* learn it best. I do sometimes lecture, but after working with CL, even my lectures are different--more interactive, more aware of how the students are responding, more like conversations.

Subject: Memorisation vs interactive participatory learning
From: ajpetto@macc.wisc.edu (Andrew Petto)

Rick (Yount) [see Generic Issues] raises an important point:

Otherwise, we're back to "lecturing over the 12 values of the discussion method" type teacher training. Perhaps this is an area for professional development within the CC system after teachers have received their basic training.

I recently attended a presentation in which the author said that there is no point in keeping people in their chairs for more than 35 minutes, since at that point, they begin to lose the ability to keep focused on a linear track (of course, he took 90 minutes to follow this line of reasoning, all the evidence, etc.).

However, colleagues at the UW, Jean Heitz and Marian Meyer, run a training workshop for TAs in the Zoology Department called "Teaching the Way We Were Taught -- NOT!" They say that we all are tempted to lapse into lecture, especially when the class is not responding, simply because we "know" the lecture mode. It forms the bulk of our own educational experience as students (and even at professional meetings).

Finally, let me commend to all of you an article in the most recent Science and Education which also ties in the themes of collaborative learning and content-driven expository teaching. With the unlikely title "Providing a contextual base and a theoretical structure to guide the teaching of science from early to senior years," Arthur Stinner has suggested that "contextual" teaching helps students to build a framework for learning the really hard stuff -- like what is phosphoglyeraldehyde and why should I care to learn about this? His science ed students were successful in teaching difficult concepts to students by building a science "story" -- a combination of history, theory, experiments, ideas, even "romance or adventure. When students were able to contextualize the information into the "Larger Context Problem" with an identifiable central theme, they were more successful at learning the stuff -- and happier about it, too! Check it out -- Science and Education 5(3):247-266; 1996. Problem is, Stinner admits, few of our texts are set up this way (and although publishers I have talked to are sympathetic -- at least to my face -- they are too worried about sales to risk printing a text THIS way). Now, off to prepare my Wednesday fare -- two sets of collaborative problems for learning this week's theme, tissues. Tomorrow we unravel the secret behind the preponderance of sarcomas among cancers and try to re-wire a negative feedback loop into a positive one.

Can you suggest a collaborative way to teach/learn the Krebs Cycle? I learned it by memorising the various steps along the pathway. I saw it as my own responsibility to make sure I internalised the information.

Well, yes. I did it last week -- we compared the effects of cyanide to uncouplers as poisons that undo cellular respiration in very different ways. Groups of 2-3 students had to solve the problem, then we followed some of the explanations/solutions in class the next time around. It is also clear in the OTHER work that the students due for this class that they must take responsibility for their own learning -- in fact, I think that collaborative learning is exactly that -- students must be actively involved in conceiving of and internalising the materials.

Could I rattle it all off now, five years later? No, but I would recognise a component if I saw its name, and I still understand the basic concept and purpose of TCA/ETC.

But, if you really learned it, at least you ought to be able to have it at hand in the class that you took the NEXT semester in which it was discussed in a nearly identical context. Not that you wouldn't need a refresher, but that you would not be clueless. Memorising in a context; memorising so that material is readily at hand when needed in related contexts; Good, good. We all have to drill ourselves on some details to be sure we got it right.

What *I* was complaining about, at least, was memorisation as a survival skill only and not in conjunction with a learning strategy. I have also (I think we all have) had great wonderful and wise teachers who have lectured primarily in their classes. My organic chem teacher was one, and I loved the course (and did well, too). But he never had us memorise anything for the sake of memorising it. He always argued that the reason to have something readily at hand was that it was necessary to do so and there were no viable alternatives to having it committed to memory. And in his classes, the answer to over half the exam questions was "water." He argued that the stuff was to damned important to organic chemistry that we ought to be accustomed to seeing it everywhere.

Andrew J. Petto, Editor,
National Center for Science Ed. PO Box 8880, Madison WI 53708-8880, USA