Groupwork in action...?

So a couple of days ago I commented on the idea of peer instruction, and noted how it said that peer explanation worked because a student who had just learned something recently was often able to explain it to a peer.  I compared this with my rant against groupwork from a year or so ago.

I found myself feeling more open to groupwork, now that I had a context, and when I found myself in a room with fewer computers than I expected and an internet-based lesson plan, I needed to test my confidence in it.

And yes, the first group seemed to get something out of it.  One of the students with the best English was sitting with one of the guys with a pretty basic level, and he was bringing him up.  Most of the pairs were working cooperatively and discovering stuff.  Success!... I thought.

The second group weren't as good.  Every pair seemed to have one person working and the other doing nothing.  Or one person checking their email, or playing a game, or browsing the net.

But I can't say that this was due to the "groupwork" thing, because there was a rather major difference between the two groups: most of the second group bring a laptop with them, and so they weren't working on the uni desktop machines.  Was it the seating arrangements, the screen size or maybe the lack of mice (everyone was using the touchpad) that made the whole thing seem more "solo" to them?  Or was it simply that "my laptop" is "my territory"?

This is the group I'm most likely to experiment with in terms of teamwork, though, as they seem to be a fairly tight group and work on lots of activities together in other classes.  It will be interesting to challenge my own preconceptions.

Peer Instruction

Well that was serendipitous.  Just yesterday I linked to an old post of mine called The Myth Of Groupwork.  My argument against groupwork was that students don't know how to teach each other, and that even if they did, the nature of the task doesn't present teaching as the goal, so instead of working together to learn, the students work together to fill in the gaps on the sheet.  A "task-focused" approach or, as I compared it to in that post, a "pub-quiz" approach to a question sheet.

But today I sat down to watch some videos from a Coursera MOOC on online education, provided by Georgia Tech (Georgia the US state, not Georgia the country).  Now I'm not too impressed with the course in a lot of respects so far, but it is full of very good information that I will definitely learn from.  (A fuller review may come later, when I've made a bigger dent in my workload here.)

I've just paused a video midflow to write this because the course instructor has just started talking about an idea called Peer Instruction.  Apparently it was "discovered" in 1990 by a guy who "discovered" that lecturers "didn't work".  Peer-led learning is nothing new really, and everybody knows that lectures alone don't work.  But leaving that aside...

Eric Mazur, the man credited in the video with this "discovery" did make a useful observation, even if others probably did before him.  Students who had learned a new concept in class successfully were often better able to explain it to a peer (that had been in the same lesson but hadn't understood) than the teacher, because the student has just gone through the process of reasoning out the problem.

There is one intrinsic flaw in this reasoning: a good teacher should be capable of giving a better explanation than a non-expert peer; Mazur's discovery was in effect nothing more than discovering he wasn't a particularly good teacher.  Which is a pretty good explanation, for why this teaching idea was "discovered" by one of the leading lights in optical physics (>groan<... sorry) rather than a pedagogy or education professional.

This is OK... that's how universities work, and that's why learner independence is so important in a traditional university: lecturers are subject experts, not education experts.

But it's when I compare this idea of Peer Instruction to my observations of groupwork that things start to get interesting, because the incident refered to in my previous post wasn't something that we'd just learned.  It was a grammar class with a mixture of natives, long-term learners and recent learners, so re-evaluating it from the perspective of Peer Instruction, an essential element was missing: the people who understood the concepts we were being tested on had already known them a long time before the class started, so they didn't have the recent experience of having recently worked out the answer that successful peer instruction is based on.

One of my philosophies (and a frequent undercurrent in my posts here) is that it's safer to assume a teaching technique is bad than good until you understand how it works and when, where and why it's appropriate.  Most groupwork is justified by the overly simplistic notion of "learning from your peers", but the idea of "learning from peers who have recently learned the concept" is massively more useful.

Now that I better understand the why and when of groupwork, I'm far less negative about it, but that doesn't mean I'll suddenly take it up wholeheartedly.  In my situation, this is entirely academic: my classes are at such a mixed level that I the central idea of peer instruction fails: the students who understand the concept generally understood the concept (at least in part) before the lesson -- they do not have the recent experience of working out how the language point works....

The Myth of Groupwork

Today's blog post was inspired by me walking out of a class for what may be the first time in my life.  (I probably ran out of a few classes as part of childhood tantrums, but that doesn't count.)

Now I've always felt a lot of groupwork is a waste of time, because you could complete the task much quicker on your own.  But then I would say that, wouldn't I, because I always did well at school.  Theory has it that groupwork is an opportunity for the weaker students to learn off the stronger ones.

OK, so in this particular class, I've found myself being "the one who knows stuff" in pairs a few times, so I've sat as scribe and asked the other person for all the answers, and only offered anything myself when the other person wasn't sure or when I disagreed with them.  But today we were working in threes, not pairs, and for once in my life I was no longer the brainbox/swot/smart-alec because it was something I've never learned properly.  But the group scribe (not me) was writing away, filling in the "easy" ones, including quite a few I wasn't sure about.  Her and the other guy were discussing answers, and I wasn't really able to chip in, as I didn't really know how to explain what I was trying to say, or how to word a question if I had any doubts.  So I muttered a few swear words, put down my pen, and left the room.

Why wasn't I learning off the stronger students?  Quite simply because there is a difference between a good student and a good teacher: it is a teacher's job to ask questions that they already know the answer to.  Students, on the other hand, ask questions that they don't know the answer to.

What exactly was going through my classmate's head is hard to say for sure, but there's two likely explanations.

1. She was acting in a goal-orientated way.  She had a quiz in front of her and the goal was to get all the answers, like in a pub quiz.
2. She categorised the questions as "hard" and "easy" based on her own perception of difficulty, and only asked our opinion on the "hard" ones, assuming that we weren't interested in the "easy" ones. 

As I say, I can't say which of these (if either) was her motivation.  However, I can say that these two situations are quite possible, and indeed likely, in any classroom.

Both of these approaches introduce problems. 

1. In a pub quiz, everyone answers questions on topics they're confident about.  People who aren't into sports might pop outside for a fag during the sports round, for example.  Unfortunately only answering questions on what you already know doesn't lead to learning.
2. The "easy" questions are the ones we expect the weakest members of the group to answer, and we hope that by listening to the strong students answer the "hard" ones, they'll learn from them.  However, if the scribe is a strong student (and they're the ones most likely to volunteer), then the easy questions may never be asked, so the weak students never get any opportunity to do anything.  And as weak students are usually shy about their weaknesses, they're not going to butt in.

Now of course neither of these two situations is inevitable, but there are very few students who are genuinely aware of what is expected of them in groupwork -- I am only aware of it because of my own situation as a teacher.

Although I don't have any statistics to say how often these two situations arise, I can state categorically that current groupwork practices leave open the possibility that these situations arise, and it's a possibility that the teacher has little control over or visibility of.

Perhaps the teacher is also blinded by a task-orientated mindset.  When we see that the task is completed and the students have the correct answers, how often do we ask ourselves how they reached those answers?   Can we ever truly know?  I think not.

And that is why I called this post "the myth of groupwork".  I am not saying there's no such thing as groupwork, but that groupwork is something we take on faith, uncritical of the facts or evidence.

As teachers we cannot directly control our students' thoughts, but we must take steps to reduce the possibilities for them to complete tasks in pedagogically pointless ways.  Current groupwork practice opens up too many "wrong paths", and that needs to change.