500 Tips on Group Learning

Sally Brown, Phil Race

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781135372897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Including sections on creative thinking, problems in groups, feedback mechanisms, dealing with conflict, and gender issues within groups, this volume is designed to aid educators and trainers to create more effective group learning situations.

Chapter 1 Learning with others

1 Learning about learning

2 Group learning means learning by doing

3 Group learning means learning through feedback

4 Things going wrong can be good group learning

5 Group learning means motivation… wanting to learn…

…or needing to learn

6 Behaviours of a good leader

7 Group learning includes following

8 Benefits of group learning

Benefits for group learners themselves

Benefits for tutors, trainers, learning facilitators

Benefits for employers (or future employers) of learners

Benefits for learning organizations and institutions

Group learning involves two main kinds of processes – learning processes, and the processes of working with others. In this chapter, we start by taking a closer look at learning processes in general as well as in the particular context of collaborative learning. Suggestions are offered about ways of helping learners in groups to learn by doing, learn through feedback and learn from their mistakes, too. All of this depends at least to some extent on learners' levels of motivation – how strongly they want to learn and how well they have ownership of their need to learn.

The chapter ends with some suggestions on how to motivate group learners (and significant others in the overall picture of their learning) by expressing the benefits that can arise from successful group learning.

1

Learning about learning

Becoming better at learning is one of the most important aims for anyone participating in education or training programmes. To help people to be effective at learning in group situations, it is useful to help them to reappraise, if necessary, their thinking about how they learn best, so that they can take control of their learning processes consciously and develop them systematically. The following suggestions may help you to alert group learners to how they learn well.

1 Remind people how long they've been learning to learn. Ask them to reflect on just how much they actually learnt during the first two or three years of life. Remind them that most of this learning they did more or less under their own steam, without any conscious thought about teaching, training or even learning. Remind them that they still own the brain that did all of this, and can still use it to learn vast amounts of new knowledge, skills and competences.

2 Ask people about their learning in school and college. They will have learnt large amounts of information and will have forgotten most of it! However, they will have also learnt a great deal about how to take in knowledge and information and will still have this skill.

3 Remind people that much of their real learning will have occurred in group situations. While they will remember setting out systematically to learn some things on their own, the majority of their learning will have happened with other people around them.

4 Remind people that they never stop learning to learn. Ask people to think about some of the things that they have learnt only recently. Ask them how they learnt it. Ask them what they found out about themselves while learning it. Ask them who else was involved in one way or another during this learning.

5 Provide programmes for people to learn about learning. Training programmes can help people to tune into the power of their own minds. A good learning facilitator can help people to gain control of the processes by which they learn most efficiently, and how best they can use other people to help them to learn well. Many people find it useful to explore how their minds work in the company of other people and learn from each other's experiences.

6 Provide resources to help people to learn about their own learning. Not everyone is comfortable attending a training programme about learning to learn. Some people fear that inadequacies or deficiencies may be exposed. Computer-based or print-based packages that help people to explore their own learning in the comfort of privacy may be more attractive to such people. Such packages can also help people to reflect on the differences between learning alone and learning with others.

7 Get people asking themselves, ‘What did I learn about myself when I learnt this?’ Learning to learn is closely connected with understanding one's own mind and one's own preferences and choices. Suggest that people learn even more about themselves when they reflect on group interactions.

8 Get people asking, ‘What really worked when I learnt this?’ The chances are that the factors that made one element of learning successful will be transferable to their next element of learning. There are long words for this, such as ‘metacognitive processing’, but it's simply about helping people to be looking inwards at what works for them when they learn and what doesn't. In particular, it is useful to get people thinking about what works best for them in group situations so that they can help to make learning groups more productive.

9 Get people teasing out what slows their learning down. The more we all know about how the brakes work, the better we can use them only when we need them. In the context of group learning, it is helpful for all group members to be aware of the things that can interfere with effective collaborative learning so that they can minimize such effects.

10 Legitimize learning to learn in the appraisal cycle. If your organization uses regular appraisal or review interviews, include the agenda of what people have learnt about their own learning since the last interview, and ask them to comment on how much of this learning was in group contexts.

11 Get individuals to articulate ‘learning to learn’ targets. Target-setting should not just be about gaining further knowledge, competences or skills, but should include setting out goals relating to the further development of a learning toolkit of approaches and methods. When individuals have defined their targets already, it is much quicker for a group to start off by finding out how many of these targets are congruent.

2

Group learning means learning by doing

‘One must learn by doing the thing; though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try’ (Sophocles, 495–406 BC). A lot has been said (and written) about how human beings learn most effectively. Psychology is still a very young science! Some of the theories and models are more easily related to practice than others. It is worth asking people who are about to learn in group contexts how they became good at something, comparing their answers with each other's and with the responses given below, and then following up the implications of people's answers to these questions. This will help you to find out more about how to help people to learn effectively together.

1 Think of something that you know you do well. How did you become good at this? Most people reply with words such as: ‘Lots of practice’, ‘I learnt this by doing it’, ‘I became good at this through trial and error’. Seeing the common ground in their answers to these questions can help group learners to see how they can learn well collaboratively.

2 Avoid pigeonholing people into ‘learning styles’. While there is much to be gained in alerting people to their preferred ways of learning, there is a serious danger that they end up feeling that they are trapped in the styles that they seem to have adopted for themselves. Human beings are very versatile animals, and can change their approaches to learning much more easily than is sometimes sugge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 Learning with others
• Chapter 2 Getting groups going
• Chapter 3 Particular group learning contexts
• Chapter 4 Exercises and processes for groups
• Chapter 5 Groups behaving badly?
• Chapter 6 Assessing group learning
• Further Reading
• Index