Curricula for Diversity in Education

Tony Booth, Mary Masterton, Patricia Potts, Will Swann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138421349
• eBook ISBN: 9781136127403
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

They can make a start by recognising and accepting difference in their students and by providing curricula that are accessible to all. This volume portrays attempts to alleviate difficlties in learning across the curriculum, in history, mathematics, poetry and science, and explores ways of supporting children with disabilities. It examines how approaches to reducing difficulties have changed in the last decade, looking at the experience of children and young people under pressure: children who are bullied; young people affected by HIV and AIDS; youth `trainees' and children in `care'. There is a final section on basic methods of research into educational practice.

Part 1

Teaching for diversity

Chapter 1

Collaborative classrooms

Susan Hart

In this chapter Susan Hart describes some of the results and conclusions of a study of collaborative learning environments in primary classrooms. The project began with the aim of investigating the use of collaborative activities by teachers under normal classroom conditions, but reached the conclusion that collaboration in the classrooms observed involved much more than ‘group work’. The research turned to describing the collaborative learning environment which teachers sought to foster. To develop such an environment, teachers aimed to create a self-supporting framework, in which pupils could work independently of the teacher, using the resource of other pupils and contributing actively to their own learning. Teachers taught pupils how to make use of this environment by structuring collaborative work, supporting pupils in working together and demonstrating the purposes and processes of collaboration.

1 BACKGROUND TO THE PROJECT

A busy afternoon in an infant classroom. Eileen, the class teacher, is working with a group of boys who are inventing an adventure story about the castle they have just constructed together. Two girls (just turned 6) approach; they want to make a television. Is it all right? Eileen nods absently, still engrossed in the work of the group. The girls disappear in the direction of the junk modelling box. When they re-emerge, a morning later, they have made a television set, a video recorder with space to insert cassettes, three appropriately sized cassettes labelled with the names of the programmes and three alternative pictures of ‘scenes’ from each cassette to fit the TV screen. The model is presented with some pride to the class. Its working are explained, with an invitation to ‘watch’ the videos or offer suggestions about other films to include.

What were these girls learning through this activity? Where did the idea come from and how did it relate to their developing interests, understandings and skills? Does such spontaneous activity have a legitimate place in the National Curriculum? And what did they gain from doing it together?

This chapter is about the possibilities for creating learning environments which encourage children to work and learn collaboratively. It is about ways of organising learning activities so that children expect and are able to help one another, to share ideas, to comment constructively upon one another’s work, to recognise and use one another’s resources in ways which support and enhance learning.

The chapter tells the story of a small-scale research project which set out to study how experienced teachers were developing ‘collaborative’ methods of working.¹ The project ran into difficulties when we discovered that the forms of ‘collaboration’ being developed in the classrooms observed were more all-pervasive yet apparently less structured and organised than had been anticipated. The findings drew attention to the contrast between the teacher-initiated models of ‘group work’ which at the time offered the only practical insights and guidance available in the literature (e.g. Barnes and Todd 1977, Tann 1981, Biott and Clough 1983, Slavin 1983, Johnson et al. 1984) and the long-standing commitment of many primary teachers to promoting independence and self-direction in learning. With hindsight, it was obvious that teachers whose practice reflected these aims would be seeking strategies for encouraging collaboration which allowed room for spontaneous, child-initiated (as well as teacher-led) collaborative activity. Yet nowhere in the existing research or literature does this need appear to be acknowledged, let alone addressed. In this chapter, I describe how the work in these classrooms has helped to highlight this neglected area, and offer a first tentative analysis of the processes involved. I suggest that, in spite of appearances, these processes are every bit as carefully organised and crafted as those involved in setting up ‘group work’, and I propose some starting points for further discussion and development.

We did not expect or intend that the project should address issues of this kind. It had been set up with a directly practical focus: to provide insights and resources which would help teachers in initial training to prepare themselves to use activities involving collaborative work between children. Since there was little practical guidance available in the literature and most previous research had not been carried out under normal classroom conditions, we decided to enlist the help of a number of experienced teachers who were using ‘collaborative approaches successfully. The intention of the project was to investigate how teachers across the primary age-range used collaborative tasks as an integral part of their normal classroom activity and what they did to enable the children to work effectively together.

The kinds of activities which we had in mind were problem-solving and investigations, collaborative writing, reading and discussion about books and poems in pairs and groups, group picture or collage making, group construction tasks, group activities on the computer: the sorts of activities whose value is widely accepted and which might be included in the repertoire of any teacher, regardless of differences in overall teaching style.

We made it a condition that, as far as possible, teachers and pupils should be observed working in their usual way. We wanted our findings to reflect normal classroom processes rather than the circumstances dictated by the needs of a research programme. It did not occur to us that ‘working in their usual way’ might prove to be so different from what we were expecting that work on the project would be brought virtually to a standstill.

2 WHEN ‘COLLABORATION’ IS NOT ‘GROUP WORK’

The following examples illustrate the sorts of problems we encountered when we tried to apply our notion of ‘shared tasks’ in these classrooms.

Example 1:
Two 3rd year juniors were engaged in design and construction tasks. One was having difficulty fitting wheels on his police car. The other left his work briefly to lend a hand. They talked together and worked out how to solve the problem. He returned to his own tasks. Some moments later another problem arose. He offered help again, then continued with his own work.

The first striking feature of the collaboration we observed was that most of it was associated with individual rather than shared tasks. This was puzzling because in our minds ‘collaborative learning’ was about children working together on the same tasks, with the shared experience providing the context and reason for interaction. No doubt the sort of collaboration recorded in this example could be found in any classroom, whether the teacher intended it or not. However, from the teacher’s comments it was clear that it was very much intended. The activity had been planned so that when children helped one another they would be using principles applied in problem-solving on one of the tasks and applying them in a new form on the other. Planning for collaboration therefore did not necessarily imply planning collaborative tasks.

Example 2:
Four boys decided to write a story together. They requested permission to work on their own in a small area immediately outside the classroom, collected paper and felts, decided between them how to take turns to scribe. The boys not scribing joined in by offering ideas and producing elaborate pictures, inventing new details to enliven the narrative as they developed their pictures. Enthusiasm was sustained over a number of weeks, read out in instalments to the class and eventually produced as a book.

A second characteristic of the collaboration in these classrooms was that so much of it appeared to arise spontaneously. When children were engaged in sustained collaborative activity in pairs or groups, this had in most cases been initiated by themselves, albeit with the teacher’s blessing. This did not fit with the idea of ‘collaborative activities’ which we had set out with because we had formulated our questions in terms of the teacher’s decision making. We had been trying to understand the teacher’s purposes and actions in enabling successful collaboration to take place. If the teacher had had no obvious part in planning or organising an activity, it was difficult to see what might be learnt from it that would be of help to other teachers.

Example 3:
Four girls were seated round a table, each writing individually. One girl stopped the others to ask advice about how to write down the ghostly sound of a door opening. She made the sound she wanted to write, and the other girls made suggestions. Combinations of letters were discussed and rejected on various grounds. Eventually a solution was decided upon, along with a word such as ‘squeaked’ to help convey the sound intended.

Although an impressive example of children sharing and exploring ideas together, this could not reasonably be called a ‘collaborative group activity’ of the sort we were anticipating. It was simply a conversation in which the group was significant only in so far as any communication requires two or more people to support it. This example drew attention to an important difference between ‘group work’ as a way of classifying classroom situations and ‘group work’ as a teaching-learning strategy: a way of creating learning opportunities. In this example, the teacher had not ‘set up’ a group-learning experience. It arose from the child’s writing, from her awareness of audience and her commitment to communicating with them.

Example 4:
Four middle infants were making a castle using a construction kit. As they built in each new feature, they discussed how it would help to defend the castle from attackers. Noticing the creative/fantasy element in their talk, the teacher encouraged them, once the castle was finished, to make up a story together about what happened in the castle, while she wrote their ideas down for them. They later typed these up on the computer and made the story into a book.

In this case, the teacher’s involvement in the collaborative writing was the problem from our point of view. We had been assuming that it was the absence of the teacher which created the unique benefits of collaborative learning. This would allow children to take over control of a task, and allow teachers time to work intensively with individuals and groups. This example revealed the possibilities for developing collaborative learning with the teacher present. Working as a group, and supported by the teacher’s skilful questioning, the children together could extend and develop each other’s thinking in ways which a teacher with only one child could not.

Example 5:
Three middle infants were looking at wood-lice through a magnifying glass. Each had a glass and a wood-louse. They were working side by side but there was very little exchange of ideas and observations.

Perhaps most challenging of all was the discovery that in these classrooms there was rarely any obligation to work collaboratively. In this example, the children were grouped to enable collaboration to occur, but they chose to work individually. We expected that if a task was set as a group task, then it should be done as a group. The teacher’s purposes in selecting it as a ‘collaborative’ activity would be undermined if some children worked individually. In this activity, the teacher saw the choice to observe silently, to reflect upon what was observed individually as legitimate and as educational as engaging in an animated discussion. The children’s choice ought therefore to be respected.

To summarise, the real...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Teaching for diversity
• Part 2 Support for learning
• Part 3 Changing special curricula
• Part 4 Children and young people under pressure
• Part 5 Representing practice
• Index