Group Work in the Primary Classroom

Maurice Galton, John Williamson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134958962
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawing on the work of Vygotsky, the authors look at the social and emotional advantages children can gain from working together. They use case studies derived from the ORACLE II group work project at Leicester, and also take into account the advances made in collaborative group work in other countries. The result is a set of guidelines from which teachers can plan policies suitable for their own schools.

1
GROUPING AND GROUP WORK

CO-OPERATION IN THE PRIMARY CLASSROOM

Let us begin by describing two contrasting incidents involving junior-aged pupils in the primary classroom. The first incident took place in a small school with a class covering a three-year age range (8+to 10+). The teacher has been reading them the story, Walkabout, by James Simpson. The book recounts the adventures of some boys and girls who are the same age as the present pupils. They are flying with their father across the Australian ‘outback’ when the engine fails, the plane crashes and the father is killed. The children meet and are befriended by an aborigine who eventually leads them to safety.

On this particular afternoon in early spring, the teacher has finished the book and the children have been set the following task. They are to work together in groups of four to create a mime which tells the story of the plane crash and their meeting with the aborigine. I am there to observe, as part of a research project, and among the group of children that I am watching there is one very striking feature. During the lesson, one boy takes no part whatsoever in the discussion. He sits there rocking back and forward on two legs of his chair—unless the teacher is present or is looking in his direction. On these occasions he affects an air of intense concentration while listening to what the other pupils are saying. I become so interested in this pupil that I decide to abandon my plan of rotating around the groups and instead I concentrate on this boy, looking to note the points in time when he communicates with the others. However, my sheet of paper remains blank since he says nothing throughout the entire lesson. Eventually thegroup discussion is ended and the children go out to play. After the break the groups are to rehearse their mime.

Before he goes out to play I join the boy in question and ask, with a certain diffidence,

Me I have been watching your group for some time this afternoon but I couldn’t help noticing that you didn’t take a very active part. You didn’t appear to speak during the whole three-quarters of an hour of the lesson.

Him No. I wouldn’t, would I?

Me Why is that?

Him I’m the pilot, aren’t I? I’m dead and dead men don’t speak, do they?

Subsequent conversation elicited the fact that he didn’t like working in groups. ‘It’s a waste of time,’ he commented and with that definitive assessment he left me and went out to play. I noticed, however, that in the playground he joined a group of peers and at once engaged in animated conversation.

Contrast this incident with another in a different school. Here the children were mostly 11 years old. In the previous year, as they later told me, they had a teacher, Mrs Wright, who was Very keen on groups’. They liked working together because ‘it was good to share ideas with your friends’. However, this year they had moved instead to Miss Vickers. She, according to the children, was ‘a bit old fashioned’ and ‘not quite with it’. Miss Vickers made them work alone, particularly when they were writing stories. She had told them she wanted their own ideas and ‘they were not to copy from each other’.

Me Did you find that difficult? I mean changing from one way of working to another.

Pupils (in a chorus) No.

Me So it doesn’t matter which way you work?

Pupil No, because when we got home after school we telephoned each other and discussed our stories.

The two incidents are of interest, not only because they reflect a range of different teaching styles and attitudes on the part of the teachers but also because they demonstrate different levels of commitment from the pupils. In the first incident the boy showed a marked reluctance to engage in any kind of communication with the other pupils in his group. His reluctance, however, didnot extend to playing with his peers after class. We do not know the reasons for his reluctance, whether specifically it had to do with the particular lesson or whether he disliked all kinds of drama, but his response to my questions seemed to imply that it was the teaching method itself which he disliked. The second group of pupils in Miss Vickers’s class, however, showed a strong commitment to sharing ideas, so much so that they were prepared to subvert their present teacher’s intention and to continue to share ideas even though they had been specifically forbidden to do so during the lesson.

There is a range of possible explanations that might be offered to account for such behaviour. According to some teachers, ‘working together in a group is an adult activity and it is not to be expected that young children of primary age will find it easy. After all, children at this age are very self-centred’. Other teachers argue that the size and make-up of the group largely determine its effectiveness, while still others say that the children will work well together only if an appropriate task is chosen.

The purpose of this book is to explore some of these hypotheses. As teachers we would probably all agree that getting young children to work together is not an easy task. That being so we need some reassurance that the effort is worthwhile both in terms of the learning processes involved and also of the learning outcomes. In this book we shall look at the evidence concerning both processes and outcomes during group work and hope that readers will find it sufficiently encouraging to accept the view that such group strategies ought to be part of every teacher’s repertoire.

SEATING ARRANGEMENTS IN THE PRIMARY CLASSROOM

One of the most puzzling features of today’s contemporary primary school concerns this question of grouping. In most primary classrooms in the United Kingdom and overseas children sit in groups either around tables or at desks pushed together to make a square. This pattern is significantly different from that observed in many secondary schools where pupils still sit in rows with the teacher’s desk centre stage at the front of the class. Like other aspects of classroom organisation the seating arrangements in the typical primary classroom say something about the prevailingideology which governs a teacher’s primary practice, that is, their ‘system of ideas, beliefs, fundamental commitments or values about social reality’ (Apple 1979:20). For example, the fact that children now sit in groups of mixed sex, unlike primary classrooms in the 1950s, indicates changes in our thinking about gender inequality and a recognition of the way in which sex stereotyping in the early years of schooling can exacerbate this problem.

It is therefore surprising, when the functioning of groups in the primary classroom is explored in greater detail, to find that practice does not appear to match the ideology which one might suppose dictates the decision to bring pupils together in this particular way. Sitting the children in groups would seem to indicate a desire for children to share not only facilities but also ideas. Yet a number of observational studies of primary classrooms has shown that verbal exchanges between pupils are much rarer than one might have supposed (Galton et al. 1980; Mortimore et al. 1988). Indeed in many classrooms teachers still insist on silence during most activities. More importantly placing children together in this way would seem to indicate a commitment, on the part of the teacher, to a philosophy of learning based upon co-operation where children are expected to work together towards a common end rather than competing for individual rewards in terms of marks and stars. In stark contrast to this view, however, is the fact that in today’s primary classrooms children are assigned individual tasks and that, for the most part, they work alone without either the intervention of the teacher or of another pupil. In so far as a pupil does use a classmate as a learning resource, this is generally accomplished by listening to the teacher talking to the other child and trying to pick up clues from the conversation which may have relevance to the pupil’s own work (Galton 1989).

Given the fact that in many primary classrooms children, although seated together, work alone it may be pertinent to ask the question why those responsible for training teachers should devote so much of their time to discussion of different forms of organisation which are built around the seating of children in groups. In early years, for example, the use of curriculum tables is often recommended. With this organisational strategy a group of children moves from a mathematics table to an English table and then to an art table in rotation, as part of an integrated day. In theORACLE study (Galton et al. 1980) this form of rotation was often accompanied by high levels of pupil distraction and there is evidence to suggest that when the tables or desks are rearranged back in rows the level of work among pupils increases markedly (Bennett and Blundell 1983; Wheldall et al. 1981). Indeed, given the levels of distraction which often appear to accompany work in groups, some primary teachers have been heard to say that in their view ‘children of this age are not capable of working in this way’. Presumably such teachers continue to operate a group seating arrangement because, as suggested earlier, it is a mark of the prevailing primary ideology which Colin Richards (1979) has described as liberal romanticism.

Another purpose of this book is, therefore, to explore some of the reasons why, given the emphasis there is on seating in groups, children working in groups appears to be a neglected art in the primary classroom. We propose initially, therefore, to regard group work as essentially problematic and to make no assumption that working in groups is in itself an essential element of ‘good primary practice’. which critics have alleged is being recommended by teacher trainers and local authority advisers to be the current prevailing orthodoxy (Alexander 1988). The first half of the book will therefore explore, in some detail, the ways in which groups are organised in the primary classroom and the ways in which children work in these groups. This discussion will be based upon evidence drawn largely from observational studies carried out in the United Kingdom. We shall then go on to consider what evidence there is to suggest that when children do actually work together in small groups there are positive outcomes, both social and cognitive, which result from this shared experience. Much of this evidence is derived from studies which have taken place outside the United Kingdom. Finally, towards the end of the first part of the book we shall attempt to derive some guidelines which might lead to effective practice in the art of group work for those who, as a result of the earlier discussions, feel that such strategies have an important part to play in the teaching and the learning of primary age children.

THE ORGANISATION OF THE PRIMARY CLASSROOM

Undoubtedly the shift towards the organisation of the primary classroom into seating groups spread rapidly during the 1960s.While in some local authorities such as Leicestershire, Oxford and the West Riding of Yorkshire, changes in the pattern of organisation took place a decade earlier, the trend accelerated in the post-Plowden era as the abolition of selective secondary education was completed and comprehensive schools came into existence. It was during the late 1960s, when Joan Barker Lunn (1970) was carrying out her study of streaming, that the momentum grew towards the abolition of streamed classrooms in the primary school as a consequence of the abandonment of selection and the eleven plus examination in many local authorities. In Leicestershire, for example, Jones (1988) recalls in his biography of Stewart Mason, the reforming Chief Education Officer, that in the 1950s when Mason appointed Dorothea Flemming as Primary Adviser, classes still contained over fifty children, sitting ‘in such tight rows that nobody could leave the room until somebody stood up’. By the beginning of the 1970s, however, most junior schools in the authority used some variation of group seating arrangements (Sealing 1972). In 1976, a survey of teachers in three local authorities, including Leicestershire, found only two out of fifty-eight classrooms where children had the traditional patterns of rows or desks. A further six either sat children in pairs but not in rows or had intricate or irregular shape patterns in which desks were lined up side by side (Galton 1981).

It would seem, therefore, that one reason for the shift towards seating in groups was possibly a reaction to the problem of mixed ability classes rather than a strategy based upon deeply held convictions about the value of co-operative learning. Before the abolition of the 11+examination, the need to group children in this way was less obvious. For the most part teachers, like their secondary colleagues, instructed the whole class and then set pupils a series of practice examples in order to consolidate the learning (what the American researchers call seat work). With the shift to mixed ability classes, however, such a strategy was no longer possible, at least for large proportions of the time. Children in any one class might be at very different stages, even where they were all engaged on the same area of the curriculum. Thus it made sense, for some teachers, to bring together children who were working at the same stage because this made the task of instructing them easier. In their survey of primary schools, Her Majesty’s Inspectors, for example, found that over 70 per cent ofteachers observed grouped children for mathematics in this way (DES 1978). For those who were fully committed to the child-centred approaches incorporated in Richards’s ‘liberal romantic’ ideology this strategy posed several difficulties. Many teachers, having been convinced by the evidence which highlighted the detrimental effects, particularly for the working-class child, as a consequence of the practice of streaming, found it questionable to replace the practice of organising classes by ability with a policy of differentiation within the classroom based on exactly the same criteria. Accordingly, other criteria were proposed, for forming groups, such as interest, friendship and family. Some of these different arrangements, described by a ‘Forum observer’, support the view that at the time when primary schools were being rapidly ‘destreamed’, teachers were exploring various grouping arrangements of this kind (Forum observer, 1966).

These different purposes of grouping have different justifications and are reflected in the assumptions and suggestions put forward by various bodies offering prescriptions for effective primary practice. Thus Her Majesty’s Inspectors (HMI) would appear to see the main advantage of grouping as a means of enabling teachers to provide work of an appropriate level of difficulty for pupils (DES 1978: para 8.32). The Inspectors also saw such groups as providing a more efficient way of introducing new topics or concepts to pupils since they called for more direct teaching of groups, particularly in mathematics. Groups appeared to the Inspectors to be a device, therefore, for increasing the amount of contact between teachers and pupils. In mathematics, for example, such groups ‘would enable challenging questions and quick recall of number facts, including multiplication tables’ which, according to the Inspectors, often require ‘a lively sustained contact between teacher and a group of children’ (para 5.65). The justification for this position arises from the fact that, according to the Inspectors, in suitably matched groups of this kind, able children were doing more challenging work and teachers were able to inject ‘more pace into the work’ and this would suggest that, for the so-called ‘basic skills’ in particular, groups should be set wherever pupils are able to undertake work of a similar level of difficulty.

The Plowden (1967) Committee, however, took a markedly different view. The Committee also recognised that organisation of a classroom into groups could be justified on economic groundsin that teachers could economise on their time ‘by teaching together a small group of children who are roughly at the same stage’ (para 7.54). This was not, however, a similar prescription as HMI, which, as we have seen, recommended streaming within the classroom, since the Plowden Committee also advised that ‘the groups should be based on interest or sometimes on achievement but that they should change in accordance with the children’s need’ (para 8.24). Thus in the Plowden model the groups were ephemeral and a child might find himself a member of several different groups in the course of a week. Plowden also, however, offered a further justification for organising a class in this way. The committee claimed that not only did the strategy allow more efficient use of a teacher’s time, enabling increased contact with pupils, but also it improved the quality of learning since within these groups children ‘make their meaning clear to themselves by having to explain it to others and gain opportunities to teach as well as learn’. Group interaction was thought to help the timid child who might be ‘less shy in risking a hypothesis in a group’ (para 7.58). Apathetic children would also benefit since they ‘may be infected by the enthusiasm of a group while other children benefit by being caught up in a thrust and counter thrust of conversation in a small group similar to themselves’ (para 7.57). In the model proposed class discussion should be introduced towards the end when the individual pupils’ contributions were complete so that ‘the pieces of the jigsaw can be fitted together…or seen not to fit’ (para 7.60). Thus the use of groups in the Plowden sense involved co-operative working between children which continued even when teachers were engaged elsewhere. The teachers’ intention should be to promote enquiry with the twin objectives of stimulating pupils’ thinking and developing their communication skills, since the teacher had ‘missed the whole point if he tells the children the answers or indicates too readily or completely how the answers may be found’ (para 6.69).

In summary, therefore, we may distinguish several purposes of groups each giving rise to a different kind of arrangement that needs to be clearly defined. First there is a seating arrangement whereby children work on a similar theme or curricular area at their own pace. We shall call such groups seating groups where pupils sit in groups but do not work as a group. This is the kind of arrangement that was favoured by Miss Vickers in the earlier incident. Second, there is the kind of group where children work on the same task because they are at approximately the same stage of learning but they work as individuals with a minimum of co-operation. They may, for example, be working on the same mathematics or language worksheet and may check each other’s answers but will be expected to work towards their own solutions. We shall call these groups working groups. Their main purpose is to use the teacher’s time more efficiently by allowing him/ her to introduce topics, give directions and guide subsequent activity in say five groups of six children rather than for thirty individuals.

The third kind of grouping also seeks to make more effective use of the time teachers have for contact with pupils. Here, however, when the teacher is attending one group of children the other pupils are expected to continue to collaborate with each other. The task is organised in such a way that individual pupils within the group contribute to a joint outcome. Thus children may be asked to discuss how to plan a scientific experiment together making certain that the testing is fair and deciding how best to record their observations. On another occasion children might be asked to compose a mime which would then be performed in front of the rest of the class as in the first incident concerning the book, Walkabout. We shall call these arrangements co-operative groups. Usually, but not always, such co-operative groups will be composed of children of different ability because one purpose behind the arrangement will be to encourage slower learning pupils to learn from their more advanced peers and to encourage the latter to clarify their ideas in their role of instructor. Bennett and Dunne (1989) also make a further distinction according to the demands of the task. They distinguish situations, such as solving a mathematical problem, where children work on the same task for a single outcome, from cases where children work on individual tasks which are not identical but which must be arranged together to provide a joint outcome. This, for example, would coincide with the children’s descriptions of part of Miss Vickers’s lesson in the second incident where the children discussed their ideas but wrote individual stories. In one such observed lesson, for example, each child organised a number of the co-operatively derived ideas into a chapter and all the chapters were then put together to make a story book which was printed on the word processor.

Table 1.1 Classification of different grouping arrangements in the primary classroom

In summary, the different possible ways in which groups are organised within the typical primary classroom are shown in Table 1.1. Categories 3 and 4 in the table make a similar distinction to that used by Bennett and Dunne (1989). We shall use the term ‘cooperative group work’ to describe the situation where pupils work on the same task but each have individual assignments which eventually are put together to form a joint outcome. One extended example of this kind of activity involved the children in planning a day trip for the class within a limited budget. Within this objective matters such as the location, transport, food and activities had to be decided upon and planned for. Each pupi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• 1: Grouping and Group Work
• 2: Group Work and Task Completion
• 3: Group Work in the Oracle Study
• 4: A Tale of Two Teachers
• 5: A Tale of Two Teachers
• 6: Group Work
• 7: Beginning and Maintaining Group Work
• 8: Changing Classroom Practice
• References