Week 5 - DCL - Collaborative Learning

What Is the Collaborative Classroom?

M.B. Tinzmann, B.F. Jones, T.F. Fennimore, J. Bakker, C. Fine, and J. Pierce
NCREL, Oak Brook, 1990 

My notes from the above reading...
In a collaborative learning environment, knowledge is shared among the teacher/s and the students. The teacher/s will have knowledge about content, skills and instruction which is shared with the students. The students' knowledge is also shared with the teacher/s, such as their personal experiences, language, strategies and culture. Authority is also shared among teachers and their students. The students are in charge of their own learning. The are able to set their own goals and also have a voice in the decision making process. They have opportunities to ask and investigate questions based on topics of their personal interests. The teachers are seen more as mediators; guiding the students as they learn how to learn. In a collaborative learning environment, the students are not grouped according to ability, age, interests, achievement or any other type of typical feature. Every student, no matter what background, has something to offer, and in turn, every child no matter what ability can learn new things from their peers. 

So you're a teacher in a collaborative classroom. What is your role?

In a collaborative classroom, a teacher is a facilitator and a model. 
Facilitating eg classroom furniture is flexible and the room is resource rich with diverse types of media available, students have group roles, parents/community involved, rules are co-constructed, and learning tasks involve collaborative decision making and problem solving. Modelling eg 'thinking out loud', demonstrating, and Coach Coaching. 

What if you're a student in a collaborative classroom?

Well your roles are: be a goal setter, plan your own learning activities, monitor your own learning, and be a self-assessment ninja.

But when teachers and schools transition from traditional to collaborative instruction, it's not all plain sailing. 

A collaborative classroom can be nosier than traditionally run classrooms, and it might be perceived that the children are off-task and unruly. However, a smoothly run collaborative classroom would have specific rules and standards set for the students to adhere to, as they move around the room, actively participating in their learning.

Teachers may worry that they have to adapt all their planning for this model of teaching and learning. But in actual fact, if we expect the students to work collaboratively, then teachers should too. Teachers can help each other out and their planning can be shared. Less time spent on planning means more time to sort out other issues, or grab another cuppa.

But what about the gifted and talented students? Aren't they going to be held back by the rest in this mixed ability classroom? And do our lower achieving students have much to offer? Consider this, if each individual child shares an idea, a pool of cumulative knowledge will be overflowing with ideas.

It's possible that a high achieving student will have a learning area that they need help with. Being in a collaborative learning environment means that the high achievers can have their learning gaps filled by other students' sharing their knowledge and ideas. From my experiences as a teacher, I have observed that lower achieving students have intuitiveness, wisdom, and thoughts that are often overlooked by their peers. Shy students are not overlooked either, as they may feel comfortable sharing to a smaller group, and they can also use other media to present their ideas, such as technology, writing, or art. All in all, each student has much to learn from each other, as each of them are unique, experienced and skilled in their own ways. 

With assessment, there could be a problem where students are assessed as a group, instead of being assessed for individual work. Are ALL students in a particular group deserving of the same grade? Well perhaps each student is responsible for completing a certain sub-task of the learning activity each which can be assessed individually. One activity that lends well to this is the 'jig-saw'.

There's an issue that I've been thinking about that relates to where I currently teach. We have home classes which are pretty much a heterogeneous grouping of students. We don't spend that much time with our home classes, probably only 20% of learning time each week. But our literacy and maths programmes are structured homogeneously. To remedy this, there would need to be school-wide restructuring??! Our interchange groups are mixed ability classes (they are our home classes) and I get the opportunity to teach all of them during the year. We have also grouped year 7 and year 8's together as separate classes, depending on the topic/subject being taught.


What about research and the collaborative classroom?

There's heaps of research out there about the benefits of the collaborative classroom on students' learning.
Some main theories/arguments for/perspectives are:

• The Vygotskian Theory - inner speech, scaffolding and development, and connecting school learning to everyday life.
• Palincsar and Brown - applied the above theory (dialogue and instruction) to classroom instruction. Students 'act as the teacher' (reciprocal teaching, for example)
• Luis Moll - 'funds of knowledge' created at home, learning that takes place in the family setting, belief that the wider community can enhance students' academic growth.
• Cooperative Learning - only works if students and teachers understand and can apply/model all the skills needed for successful cooperative group work to take place.

Workshop Task
Work collaboratively to use computer coding and electronics to create your own personalised learning activity, where the students needs to work collaboratively to solve a problem.

For this activity we used Scratch, which has been around for a few years already. According to Mitch Resnick, it's important to teach kids how to code. There are new technologies available to children and young people almost everywhere, but are kids actually fluent? They can reach fluency through coding. Scratch was very new to me but I found it quite fascinating. Basically, it's a visual based programming language. Characters (Sprites) are selected, modified and animated to your choosing. You give your Sprite a set of instructions by snapping blocks (instructions) together. By stacking more and more blocks, the behaviour of the Sprite becomes more complex, it it looks like a basic animation. Using Scratch is a great way for kids to express themselves. When we introduced the Makey-Makey, that's where I got a little confused, so I need to re-visit this activity. 

Coding is a very new area for me but I can definitely see the benefits to learning. Mitch Resnick put it nicely: kids can 'learn to code AND code to learn'.
Through coding, kids learn about variables, and they learn about the process of design: be persistent, experiment with ideas, and find/fix bugs. I am very keen to use coding this year with my year 7/8 students.