Issues raised for teachers

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

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: Why some teachers are reluctant to use CL techniques.
From: aroj@abo.fi (Ann-Sofi Rvj-Lindberg)

Greetings from Vasa, Finland!

Thanks for initiating a new discussion about C!!! In this mail I will ask you two questions and then continue with telling you a little about my own experiences.

I used to be a high school teacher in math, physics and chemistry but since two years I am involved in teacher education and doing qualitative research on students' conceptions of mathematics and science teaching. Here in Finland teachers do not know much about CL. In higher ed. the main teaching method is the teacher telling-method. In primary ed. the situation is slightly better but in secondary schools you also mostly find the teacher lecturing in front of the class. You can also find student's doing so called group-work but the work is seldom structured in a way that is co-operative- collaborative. The group-work often ends up in a frustrating situation with one student doing the work or, at worse, with a big "fight" in the group and no one doing the work... Reading through the list of topics you deal with in your book I nodded in agreement many times!

Last Saturday I met a couple of teachers that are engineers and teaching in an Institute of technology. I spent about half an hour discussing co-operative learning and made them do a small exercise. I gave them a paper with about 40 pictures of different things and animals. Their task was, in groups of three, to agree on a classification system, name the classes and describe them. They were also aware of that they would all have the responsibility to tell about their classifications system in a new group. Everybody enjoyed the exercise. But then came the questions like How can I be sure that the students learn more with a co-operatively structured approach than with "ordinary" teaching?? What do research say that can convince us that it is worth while to change our teaching? How can I be sure that all the students learn what I want them to learn (if I don't tell them..)? etc.

When I have talked with secondary students about mathematics teaching it becomes very clear that their view of what math teaching should be like is very, very narrow. And they mostly don't see that it could be in any other way than the teacher telling about the topic, showing some examples, doing the exercises that the teacher put them to do and do the homework that the teacher gives them. They also say things like it is no use for me to try to change the teaching method used by the teacher as "the teacher has already decided how to conduct the lesson and will not change the plans".

Ann-Sofi Rvj-Lindberg, Department of Teacher Education, Abo Akademi University, BOX 311, FIN-65101 Vasa, Finland E-mail:aroj@abo.fi Phone. +358-61-3247382 Fax +358-61-3247302#

Subject: Why some teachers are reluctant to use CL techniques.
From: msneddon@mail.educ.gov.bc.ca (Malcolm Sneddon)

I read with great interest your plans for discussing collaborative learning. You seem to have a good handle on many of the difficulties experienced by educators as they begin to explore such a change in their classrooms. In British Columbia, we have been exploring what we have termed "co-operative learning" for some time. In fact, we have just completed a complete revision of the K to 12 provincial curriculum and co-operative learning is a key instructional strategy suggested at every grade level and in every subject area. Our post secondary institutions, at least at the college and technical school level are also defining the use of it in their instructional strategies.

I also teach a course in Co-operative Learning for the University of Victoria that is offered throughout the province via video tape, and teleconferencing. Teacher training is the single most important issue and, from personal experience workshops are only useful in promoting awareness. Collaborative learning is an extremely complex activity that can only be learned in the context of using it in the classroom. Teachers need opportunities to learn some of the structure, implement it and return for support and new components of the model. With such a model we have had great success in British Columbia. As a teacher of senior mathematics and physics let me suggest that the payoff in the sciences and mathematics is at least as great as in the arts.

The reason more teachers do not use the model is all that you have outlined. Teachers who try it without the support discover that it doesn't work or that it takes too much class time or it is more effort than it is worth. If we want it to be used as a viable technique, then we need to make sure that teachers (pre and in in service) are well enough trained to implement it.

Malcolm Sneddon
Province of British Columbia, Ministry of Education,
Skills, & Training Curriculum Branch
Fax: (604)356-2316 Phone: (604)356-2317

Subject: Why some teachers are reluctant to use CL techniques.
From: tchrmarcie@aol.com

Thanks for starting the discussion. I agree with all you have written. I teach co-operative/collaborative learning at WSU to all the new Masters in Education students. They tend to worry about the student who wastes time when he/she is in a group. This is a concern. Individual accountability must be built into the process. Once teachers realise that they can ask a student to leave a group if he/she is not participating or working with that student on an individual basis some of that fear dissipates. When my students have the opportunity to try the collaborative structures I teach right away, they keep on using them because they see the benefits immediately. Many times we take a class and don't put the new ideas into practice. We forget. I go to many conferences as a presenter, and I notice that practically all the sessions are lecture. When I do something interactive, it is always well received at a conference.

Subject: Why some teachers are reluctant to use CL techniques.
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: Why some teachers are reluctant to use CL techniques.
From: Rex_R._Campbell@muccmail.missouri.edu (Rex Campbell)

There needs to be another topic in your list: the lack of opportunity to use collaborative learning. For many of us who teach in large institutions of higher education, the large class sizes and lack of available flexible resources (human, physical and financial) make it very difficult to use such techniques regardless of their perceived value. A discussion of innovative ways of implementing such techniques would be most helpful.

Subject: Why some teachers are reluctant to use CL techniques.
From: nstegall@devry-phx.edu (Nancy L. Stegall)

At our institution, we have attempted to provide CL training by establishing two extra "CFP" hours in our freshman program. During these hours, which students are required to attend (but receive no credit), instructors lead CL activities to enrich their content presentations. The activities are designed and evaluated during a team meeting each week, and all involved instructors are required to attend that meeting. The original thinking was that this space would allow instructors to experiment with CL in a risk-free environment so that they could later implement the CL techniques in their classrooms. The results have been somewhat disappointing. Although the program has lasted through four terms, the instructors have not really "bought into" CL. Why? Here are some of the reasons I have been given--

It's too much work. Designing a really effective CL activity takes time and serious planning. Instructors who have taught out of the same set of lecture notes for 25 years are reluctant to abandon those notes and invest the time in thinking through the learning process behind those notes.

Fear. If we give up the notion that our job is to transfer our knowledge into students' heads, then what _is_ our job? There are certainly days when I do little besides watching and monitoring active students who are very happy and engaged in learning without me. If this is the case, why am I even needed in the classroom? If students "catch on" will teachers be made redundant?

Lack of confidence in creativity. Designing good CL activities does require creativity (an ability to shift paradigms and re-think content, anyway). Many instructors feel they just don't have that level of creativity or energy.

These are just some thoughts I had while reading your topic outline-- additions to (elaborations on?) your list that have struck me during my years of working with instructors. I'll be anxious to see what others say.

Nancy L. Stegall, Professor/Web Administrator E-Mail: nstegall@devry-phx.edu or stegall@primenet.com

Subject: Why some teachers are reluctant to use CL techniques.
From: mdeb@fhsuvm.fhsu.edu (Elton Beougher)

My experience with using collaborative/co-operative learning, a la Johnson and Johnson, in college classes has not been too successful. One of the keys to their method is that groups develop into supportive arrangements, with each student concerned with the welfare of the others in the group. With the pattern of student absences that is prevalent on college campuses, this is impossible. The feeling of belonging to a group cannot be established when the membership of the group is so mobile.

Subject: The resistance users of CL have encountered from faculty.
From: fowler@helios.usq.edu.au (Brian Fowler)

From this side of the Pacific I would have to agree with every word that Ted has written about the in built conservation of teaching methodology. This was a topic that I touched on at a number of venues when I visited various campuses last year following the Cape Cod Conference. In this country (and yours I am sure) there is the further complicating factor that even if a new staff member has experienced collaborative learning (or any other technique other than chalk/talk) the senior faculty won't let them do anything different. Until the senior faculty are willing to see change in their Department, then life is very difficult for the junior member who wants to introduce innovation.

Subject: The resistance users of CL have encountered from faculty.
From: SSloan@VAX2.Winona.msus.edu(Sally Sloan)

Can't resist jumping into this one... I think Ladnor was reflecting some political realities. What seems common sense to one may seem radical and impossible to others. To effect change - even something so simple seeming as having students work in study groups (a LONG way from formal J and J Co-operative Learning) is not acceptable to many students or faculty.

Isn't the issue how we can convince others of what we believe?

To reply to the earlier question of why faculty do not use Coop Lrn more - I believe a big part is that there really is serious resistance to the notion, and so many teachers simply have not the energy to deal with that. Another aspect is the imperfect understanding of what CL really is as compared to simply getting students to work together.

Subject: Ideas from users of CL on how to successfully implement CL techniques.
From: scrugs@user1.channel1.com (Hank Garvey Kennedy)

I have to agree with Jean. I teach two separate graduate level courses for teachers based on Kagan's philosophy. One of the questions asked of me is, "How can I make this a success with my class?" I always tell teachers to start simply in September. Introduce a simple structure and a team building activity and build upon that. Take the whole first term to get you and your students into the groove of co-operative learning. It will not work perfectly the first time you employ co-operative methods, but in time it will.

What I would like to add to the discussion is the dimension of support from other teachers and administrators. Without support and encouragement from peers, mentors and "the bosses" teachers can feel discouraged. Take it from one who has taught in a system in which the best, most innovative teachers are not encouraged or supported and the worst receive flattering newspaper stories written about them. Go figure.

Hank Garvey Kennedy, Middle School Woburn MA

Subject: Ideas from users of CL on how to successfully implement CL techniques.
From: hardinc@fsa.wosc.osshe.edu (Carol Harding)

Ted, as someone who had some intensive training in CL about 4 years ago, I used it for a while - in large part because I had a lot of support from colleagues and supervisors when I ran into roadblocks. I've since changed schools and the support system disappeared. Now I use bits and pieces rather than the whole system. I've also found that it tends to work better with a semester system rather than quarters. The students have a better chance to learn to trust each other and learn each other's weaknesses, I think. It also takes less proportional time out of the whole term to set up the groups and get them working well. If you haven't been in touch with anyone from Maricopa Community Colleges in Arizona (Phoenix area), they've done a lot with CL in the system.