Do you implement group work, cooperative learning, or whatever else you want to call it in your classroom where you act as a “guide” rather than the all-knowing guru of information? My hope is that you say yes to that question. My other hope is that you realize that teachers who sit at their desk, grade papers, answer e-mails, and take attendance are NOT implementing this strategy and instructional method appropriately. They are simply passing the buck off on the students and finding a way for students to complete the task with little or no effort on behalf of themselves. Guess what? This goes on in a lot of classrooms on a daily basis. Here’s the other kicker: they know full well what they are doing, and they do nothing to change. That’s part of the reason why they give these ridiculously in-depth assignment guides and rubrics that are detrimental to the development of student thinking (see more on this in part 1 and part 2).
Part of the reason that teachers are reluctant to adopt cooperative learning strategies and problem-based learning is simple: it takes a lot more work to facilitate and work with students in this capacity than it does to bark massive amounts of information at them and blame their lack of performance on poor note-taking skills. Teachers need to be actively working with students while they are attempting complicated tasks that come with problem/project-based learning; not sitting and grading papers. If you think that kids can complete these tasks without some type of facilitation then maybe the problem is that you made the task way too easy. Just because three students are working together on a project doesn’t mean that they should be able to combine brain power and whip it together with no added help. In addition, how are you stretching their minds to new capacities if you aren’t continually asking them questions that require deeper thought and search for meaning?
Bottom line: activities that students work on that require collaboration should be rigorous and be aided by the questioning and prodding of the teacher that is in the room. That individual should be up, moving around, asking questions, and contributing to the development of the knowledge base via content or skills. Otherwise, you aren’t teaching; you’re babysitting.
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I see this too often in my work as a coach. This is all part of the teacher engagement issue. How can we expect to motivate students if we show no interest in what we assign, and what they do in the classroom. Another well informed post Aaron!
Great post Aaron, my school is undergoing a transition into more cooperative learning and project-based learning; needless to say, there is a lot of push-back. I am very new to teaching but I relate very well to the techniques you describe and that we are learning about through our PLCs and whole faculty study groups. I’ve felt for a long time that most of what public schools provide is a babysitting service (sounds pejorative, but it’s very true), otherwise we would have changed scheduling radically a long time ago in my opinion. There is a necessary component of keeping kids in a safe place all day (which is a very good thing) but we need to do more than just be that “sage on stage” or group work assigning grader which you describe.
You put your ideas in writing in a way I haven’t been able to on this topic, thank you!
Aaron, for me, the sad thing is that kids recognize this babysitting behavior.
When discussing the possibility of snow make up days being added to the end of the year, one of my kids said that all snow makeup days were was free child care for parents. When I asked why, she said teachers didn’t teach on those days–that they set up activities so they could do their end-of-the-year work and kids would leave them alone.
5th grade and oh, so wise. Again, I say, sad.
Cooperative learning, i.e. group work, requires stamina, flexibility, and a deep knowledge of the subject. True that students do much of the learning through their own inquiry and research, however asking probing questions is a skill that doesn’t pop up naturally in a high school classroom.
The culture of curriculum maps organized in columns and the accompanying rubrics are the archenemy of authentic learning. Knowing sentence structure as an end in itself fits well into a rubric, but that knowledge doesn’t become important to anyone until a reasearcher/student/learner makes deliberate decisions about sentence structure to make what they know and have discovered clear to a reader.
My daughter is currently taking Honors HS Chemistry. Each class period consists of students getting in their “cooperative learning groups” where they have to cover the chapter’s material on their own. The teacher doesn’t cover *any* of the material! Call me crazy, but I’m thinking Chemistry is a class that you might want to have someone do a little teaching! Translation: I have to teach Chemistry each night! The teacher gives them a study guide to complete with their group and gives the exact same study guide as the test!!! What’s going on in this classroom gives “babysitters” a bad name! lol
Thanks for the post!
I totally agree! The work we want our students to do shouldn’t be easy, busy work. And if it’s rigorous we can’t just let them struggle on their own without some guidance! We can’t be the guide on the side from our desks! LOL
Great post! I wonder if the students feed off the level of effort the teacher is putting in? I noticed that my college students would emulate what I demonstrated in class when they got to their lab work. You are correct that it is more effort to make an interactive class though.
Another astute observation Aaron.
I think the desired behavior you describe in your post is exactly the behavior we teachers need to be engaging in to support a focus on inquiry and authentic learning tasks in our classrooms.
The differentiation our students needs is not just in the objectives we create for them, but in our behavior as well. By providing cooperative learning opportunities for the students, we can break ourselves away from the front of the class and meet the students on the floor, where they are.
I’m making this one of my professional growth goals, I think. I need to develop my own skills in this area so that I can help support teachers in their small group work with students when working in these settings. Thanks for the inspiration!
Cheers!
“If you think that kids can complete these tasks without some type of facilitation then maybe the problem is that you made the task way too easy.” -AE
This remark strikes me as telling. Perhaps the problem in this type of situation is not that you (the teacher) made the task way too easy, but that “you made” the task? Though this degree of PBL might give students a few more options within a curricular unit, I’m wondering if students perceive those options as real choices, or simply contrived ideas somebody else came up with. What if in this form of PBL we are merely trying to give them something they haven’t asked for?
I’m thinking about whether PBL should require more work of teachers. The kind of PBL that interests me involves authentic, self-directed projects. In this approach to PBL, young people are developing projects organically and teachers are involved in that young people can turn to them for ideas with a project they have in mind. It seems to me this kind of PBL is more genuine for students and requires less work for teachers.
With that said, this kind of PBL model is hard to implement within a mainstream school setting, which has played an enormous role in turning young people into consumers. Rather than create and invent, young people are often put in positions where all they are required to do is take things in (painting with broad strokes here). Because of this, young people are sometimes buffaloed when the opportunity to design their own learning experience is put to them.
A teacher that retired last year in my building brought project based learning to my school in 1982. She also required much of it to be done collaboratively. It was very controversial 30 years ago, it shouldn’t be that controversial now. (I know that it is though.)
It is time for teachers to become the professionals they want to be treated as and start to take an interest in ed theory.