What does productive group work look like? You might see it, as we did, in Amber Johnson's social science class, where students were studying American Indians and their food supplies. One of the productive group tasks involved researching food sources. Each group was assigned a different food source, and every member of the group had to locate information to share with their groupmates. Students had access to the Internet and a collection of books. Their task was to summarize their findings in writing as a group, with each member of the group contributing at least one sentence (written in a different color ink). In addition, each group member had to be able to explain the contents of the entire paper to the teacher during her interviews with students. A paragraph from the paper of the group assigned to acorns follows (font changes represent different students' writing):
Collecting acorns is a complicated task; you'll need to be able to identify the good from the bad. When you look for acorns in the fall, when they are ripe, they may fall to the ground. When you start to collect them, be sure to collect the ones with their "caps," for if you do collect the capless ones, they may have insect larvae inside. This is mainly because an acorn without a cap has likely fallen, due to the worm's activity in the acorn, causing it to shake loose of the cap. You must also heavily scrutinize the ones you did manage to collect for holes in the acorns' shell, as these will also indicate the presence of a foul acorn.
The paragraph makes sense and conveys accurate and interesting information. More importantly, it represents the collaborative knowledge of a group of students working together and sharing information. This opportunity to consolidate knowledge with peers also prepares students for completing later independent tasks, readying them for the eventuality of independent learning.
All of us gain knowledge through peer interaction. It's part of daily life. A few years ago, while attending an education conference, we noted just such an instance of informal group learning. It didn't take place during a conference session, but as a group of us were having breakfast.
That morning, we woke up to news that a man named John Mark Karr had confessed to being involved in the murder of JonBenét Ramsey. He had been arrested and was being flown from Thailand to Colorado. Each of us read the newspaper article, and, being teachers, we applied the kinds of comprehension strategies that we routinely teach. It wasn't hard for any of us to identify the article's main idea, locate supporting facts, visualize, summarize, infer, and the like. But it was not this article's content that stands out in our memory, but the group conversation it led to.
Our breakfast table that morning was abuzz with conversation. Finally, it seemed, the killer had been found, and the Ramsey family could get closure. Then, one of the members of the group expressed frustration: "Why did the criminal get to fly first class? I came here in coach!" The conversation changed direction as we talked about this. At one point, another member of the breakfast group asked, "So, is our recommendation that he should have traveled in coach, where there are more children?" We decided that putting the suspect in first class had probably been a good idea, if only to keep other travelers safe. Someone else wondered, "But why did he get to drink—champagne, was it?—during the flight?"
This question triggered a number of perspectives, experiences, and reactions. The conversation turned from the newspaper article to the legal system. Could evidence obtained under the influence of alcohol while in police custody be used in court? None of us was sure about this, but we all wanted to know. The group work, our face-to-face interaction with information, provoked interest and inquiry. It required that we present information from the text and explain nuances. We had to infer. We had to listen, debate, and negotiate. And as a result, we validated and extended our own understanding. We learned from one another.
Educators have understood the importance of collaborative group learning for decades. A large body of research shows that students involved in cooperative work demonstrate higher levels of academic learning and retention than their peers working individually. This increase in learning has been seen in elementary, middle, and high school students across disciplines. For example, in a comparison study, 2nd grade students in classrooms that stressed cooperative learning were found to perform better on a measure of reading comprehension than those in traditional classrooms (Law, 2008). A large-scale analysis derived from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) of almost 5,000 Japanese 13-year-old science students found that the use of small-group cooperative learning activities was positively associated with science achievement scores (House, 2005). Similar results were obtained in a meta-analysis of studies on the effects of cooperative learning on high school and undergraduate chemistry students (Bowen, 2000).
Equally impressive is that cooperative group work has been shown to result in increased self-esteem, improved relationships among students, and enhanced social and education skills. Studies have demonstrated group work's positive effects on interactions among students in middle school (Gillies, 2008), and middle school students also reported that they favored this type of learning over working independently (Mueller & Fleming, 2001). Elementary students in classrooms that used cooperative learning techniques were found to have higher levels of motivation and a more positive perception of school (Battistich, Solomon, & Delucchi, 1993).
Group Work Gone Wrong
Although the effectiveness of collaborative learning is well documented, we are also acutely aware of its failures. They are the reason so many students resist working in groups and why some teachers avoid using group work in their classrooms.
Most students (and many teachers) have never experienced genuine collaborative learning. For a majority of us, our experience of academic group work consists of being thrown together into a group and then expected to create a product, learn a skill, or accomplish a task without additional support from the instructor. The group frequently starts out with good intentions but often ends with one or two students taking over and doing the lion's share of the work while the rest play minor roles. The "worker bees" often feel put upon, taken advantage of, or shackled by their peers, while sidelined members of the group frequently feel inadequate, unable to keep up, or that they have nothing valuable to contribute. Whether students experience group work as a worker bee, gopher, or hitchhiker, the end results are generally the same—lots of frustration and too little real learning.
Doug remembers having just such an experience as a high school student in a large public school that was attempting to implement cooperative learning. Unfortunately, the tasks his teachers assigned did not require individual accountability. Instead, groups of students worked together to produce one "thing." For example, his government teacher assigned research topics to groups of students and gave each group a pile of forms to fill out in preparation for a group paper and group speech. One of these forms required that the group summarize the positive and negative aspects of their assigned topic. (The topic assigned to Doug's group was laetrile as a cancer treatment.) Their assignment was to address specific areas of concern, including economic, government/freedom, health, safety, moral/justice, religious, legal, and aesthetic.
Doug understood early on in his high school career that it was beneficial to choose group partners who wanted to work hard and please the teacher; the harder the other members of his group were willing to work, the less he had to. In other words, Doug was a hitchhiker, and, as a result, he did very little work in high school. (College, he notes, was a shock, and he had to struggle to develop good study habits and time management skills.)
For this particular project in government class, Doug's group completed and submitted, on time, each and every form provided—all 18 of them. The group got an A on the packet, an A on the essay, and an A on the speech. Doug recalls being part of the group but not doing any of the prep work or essay writing. He does remember giving part of the speech, which was written by another member of the group. Obviously, Doug did not get very much out of this experience, and neither, he imagines, did his teacher, who would have been unable to determine which students understood the content and which did not. Here, the failed implementation of cooperative learning groups resulted in failure to check for understanding or link instruction with performance. Because the group work had not been designed to yield information about individual student performance, the teacher was left to assume that every member of the group understood the content equally well.
Although Doug's teacher may not have recognized that these collaborative learning efforts were unsuccessful, most teachers do know when group work has gone awry. Mathematics teacher Grace Coates described an early, unsatisfying foray into group learning this way:
Where I had imagined cooperative dialogue, there was bickering and arguing over materials. Where I had envisioned smiles, many students wore sullen looks. A few wore triumphant smiles as they managed to take over the work or materials. Where I had hoped for thoughtful curiosity, there were pleading looks saying, "What do I do?" I was so disappointed by these results and my inability to change things in a way that would get my students working productively. (2005, p. 11)
While Coates originally believed that the grouping alone would take care of everything, she came to realize that her students needed to learn how to communicate with one another over a meaningful task.
Because group work is so much a part of adult daily life, we can easily underestimate the thinking, planning, and skill development necessary for our students to work together successfully. Teachers know group work is beneficial, but they start out without having identified and established the right conditions. Education specialist Elizabeth Cohen (1994) notes that "the teacher who has no more tools for the planning of group work than an initial attraction to an idea … is likely to run into trouble" (p. 22).
In writing this book, our goal is to give you, a classroom teacher, the tools and knowledge you need to design and guide group work that is successful—that is productive. As you will see in Chapter 1, our approach expands on prior cooperative learning research (e.g., Johnson & Johnson, 1994) and includes newer information about backward planning and differentiated instruction. In the kind of
productive group work you will be reading about in the pages to come, all students are engaged with the academic content and with each other, and the end result is consolidated and extended knowledge for all.
Productive Group Work in the Bigger Instructional Picture
This book is also a natural next step in support of the gradual release of responsibility model of instruction, the focus of Doug and Nancy's book Better Learning Through Structured Teaching (Fisher & Frey, 2008a). The gradual release of responsibility model stipulates that the teacher move from assuming "all the responsibility for performing a task … to a situation in which the students assume all of the responsibility" (Duke & Pearson, 2002, p. 211). This gradual release may occur over a day, a week, a month, or a year. The teacher begins by modeling the desired learning. Over time, students assume more responsibility for the task, moving from being participants in the modeled lesson, to apprentices in shared instruction, to collaborators with their peers, and finally, to independent performers (see Figure A).
Figure A. The Gradual Release of Responsibility Model
The framework's components are as follows:
- Focus lesson: The teacher establishes the lesson's purpose and models his or her own thinking for students to illustrate how to approach the new learning.
- Guided instruction: The teacher strategically uses assessment-informed prompts, cues, and questions to guide students to increasingly complex thinking and facilitate students' increased responsibility for task completion.
- Collaborative learning: The teacher designs and supervises tasks that enable students to consolidate their thinking and understanding—and that require students to generate individual products that can provide formative assessment information.
- Independent tasks: The teacher designs and supervises tasks that require students to apply information they have been taught to create new and authentic products. This phase of the instructional framework is ideal for the "spiral review" that so many educators know their students need, and it is a way to build students' confidence by allowing them to demonstrate their expanding competence.
Our focus on productive group work is an attempt to rectify the fact that many current implementations of the gradual release of responsibility model focus primarily on teacher/student interactions and overlook student/student interactions: learning through collaboration with peers. Productive group work provides students an opportunity to collaborate to complete specific tasks. Sometimes the teacher develops and guides these tasks, and other times the tasks are student initiated and student led. Regardless, these tasks provide students an opportunity to work together to solve problems, discover information, and complete projects.
The best productive group work tasks allow students to apply what they have learned during teacher-modeled focus lessons and guided instruction, and they prepare students for independent learning, which is the ultimate goal of instruction. Less-effective tasks are those that are disconnected from the course of study or topic. Too often, these less-than-effective tasks have been the mainstay of group work, which is why we believe teachers too rarely employ the collaboration component of the gradual release of responsibility model. In this book, you will meet several teachers who buck this trend and, instead, regularly use productive group work as part of a gradual release of responsibility to ensure that all students learn. Before we proceed, though, it's worth pausing to consider the role of the teacher during group work.
Guiding Instruction During Productive Group Work
If productive group work is primarily about student collaboration, what is it that the teacher should be doing? Nancy remembers supervising group work tasks by walking around the classroom. At the risk of dating herself, she likens herself at that time to Julie, the cruise director on The Love Boat. Her job seemed to be checking on people to see if they were OK and having fun. Since those days, she has learned a great deal about the teacher's role during productive group work.
We have introduced the idea of guided instruction and defined it as the strategic use of cues, prompts, and questions. Guided instruction is a teacher behavior that can occur with the whole class, with small groups, or with an individual student. Determining when to use whole-class, small-group, or individual guided instruction is something teachers often have to decide by observing students as a lesson unfolds. For example, after establishing the purpose of a lesson by explaining that they will work on analyzing data for probabilities, Ms. Anderson might model how to solve a probability problem as follows:
A spinner has four equal sectors colored yellow, blue, green, and red.
What are the chances of landing on blue after spinning the spinner?
What are the chances of landing on red?
Next, she shares her thinking about this problem:
I see that there are four color choices. Each color on the spinner seems to take up the same amount of space, and the question says that the four sectors are equal. I know that this means that I have the same chance of landing on red as blue or green or yellow. I also know that the spinner has to stop on only one color. So, thinking about the first question, I know that there is only one way to land on blue and that is if the spinner stops there. So I'll put the number one on the top or as the numerator. For the denominator, I have to think about all of the possibilities. There are four colors, so the spinner could land on any of the four. Four is my denominator. Therefore, my ratio is 1/4. So, I have a one-fourth, or 25-percent chance, of landing on blue.
Following this modeling, Ms. Anderson introduces the next problem:
What is the probability of choosing a vowel from the alphabet?
For this problem, she uses whole-class guided instruction. She starts with questions:
Ms. Anderson: What do I need to know to start thinking about this problem?
Martha: How many vowels there are.
Ms. Anderson: Excellent, yes. And how many vowels are there in English, Edgar?
Edgar: Five or six, depending on if you count y.
Ms. Anderson: Good point. For this problem, let's agree to use the five common vowels. Now, what else do we need to know to solve this problem?
Coriama: The denominator. It's 26, because English has a total of 26 letters.
Ms. Anderson: Yes, exactly. So which number is the numerator, and which is the denominator? Write your ideas on your dry-erase boards and hold them up for me.
At this point, Ms. Anderson scans the room waiting for her students to write "5/26" on their boards and show her. Most of her students have the correct answer, but four do not. She concludes that the majority of the class is ready for productive group work related to probability, and four students need additional guided instruction. Ms. Anderson knows that the students who understood the problem do not need additional guided instruction. She invites them to work on a problem set in their previously established math triads, giving them this instruction:
Remember to solve each problem in three ways: with numbers; with words; and with a model, illustration, or image. You'll need to talk about your answers with one another using your approach. If you were the number person on problem 1, then you're the word person on problem 2, and so on. You'll each get three opportunities to try each method for solving the problems. Remember to write your name and method on each problem.
At that point, most of the students go to work, and Ms. Anderson invites the four students who answered the group question incorrectly to join her at the table in the center of the room. At various times of the year, every student in the class has worked with Ms. Anderson at the center table, receiving guided instruction while the rest of the class completed productive group work. When the four students arrive at the table, Ms. Anderson introduces a new problem:
Ms. Anderson: So, let's try to work a really hard one, shall we?
Students: Yeah!
Ms. Anderson: OK. Let's look at this one, number 9. "A glass jar contains six red, five green, eight blue, and three yellow marbles. If a single marble is chosen at random from the jar, what is the probability of choosing a red marble? A green marble?" Wow, that's a lot of information! How might we set this up?
Michael: Well, there are six red ones, so one out of six.
Ms. Anderson: You're partly right. Let's talk about this some more. You are going to choose one marble, so you're right on, there. But how many red marbles are there?
Michael: Six.
Ms. Anderson: So when you pick a marble, you have six chances to get red, right?
Sarah: But you're only getting one, not six. It says right here.
Ms. Anderson: You are so right; you're only choosing one marble. But how many red marbles are there in the jar? That's how you figure probability.
Sarah: Oh, because you could get pick any one of the six of the reds, right?
Ms. Anderson: Excellent, yes. Michael, can you explain that to Ahmed?
Michael: I guess. So, there is this jar with a bunch of marbles. There are six red marbles in there, so when you pick, you have six chances to pick a red one.
Ahmed: Yeah, I get that. The numerator is 6. But I don't know how to get the denominator.
Jessica: For me, that's the easy part. It's the total. The jar has 22 marbles in it. I added up the numbers of red, green, blue, and yellow, and there are 22. What I don't get is why they say "random." If the jar is glass, I can see the marbles and just get a red one.
Ahmed: But maybe it's the kind of glass you can't see through. Then you have to figure it out.
Michael: So 22 is the denominator? Then it's 6/22, right?
Jessica: You forgot to reduce. You can't have a fraction like that.
Sarah: I got 3/11 reduced. How's that?
Ms. Anderson: Did anyone get another number? Let's check. No? So we all got 3/11 for the chance of a red one. How about a green one?
While Ms. Anderson engages these four students in guided instruction, the rest of the class members continue to work in their groups of three. When she finishes with this small-group guided lesson, she joins other small groups at work and checks their understanding. Although she sees that the triad of Jeff, Kara, and Mark was able to solve the problems with numbers and illustrations, all three students seem to struggle with expressing their solution to her in words. Using a similar line of questioning she used with the group at the center table, Ms. Anderson guides Jeff, Kara, and Mark though the learning:
Ms. Anderson: OK, so instead of starting by writing things down, why don't we start by talking about one of the problems? Jeff, do you want to read number 4?
Jeff: OK, it says, "Annie rolls a single six-sided die. What is the probability she will roll an even number?"
Ms. Anderson: Great. Well, I see you already have the answer, and you've illustrated it. Talk about how you solved this problem.
Kara: Well, I started by asking myself how many even numbers a die has, and said three.
Ms. Anderson: Excellent. So how would you write that in words?
Jeff: A die has three even numbers: a two, a four, and a six?
Ms. Anderson: OK, write that down. Mark, what did you do next?
Mark: I knew that there were six sides all together, so that would make it three chances out of six that the girl would roll an even number. And three over six is the same as one-half. So I'd write that down.
Kara: Oh, I've got it. This isn't so hard. We could also say that there is a one out of six chance she will roll a two, plus a one out of six chance that she'll roll a four, plus a one out of six chance she'll roll a six … which is three out of six.
Jeff: Which is the same as one-half. OK, I got it. Let's try the next one.
In the process of explaining their thinking out loud, the students were able to build on and clarify each other's thinking. Jeff, Kara, and Mark together knew more than any one of them knew alone. Ms. Anderson did not give these students the answer; she merely created the conditions for collaborative learning and primed the pump. Now, as they complete the task, she sees that they will soon be ready for independent work related to probability.
And that's what this book is about—engaging students in productive group work that allows them practice with content and opportunities to consolidate their understanding as they proceed toward independent learning. Productive group work also provides teachers with opportunities to reteach those students in need of additional instruction without sacrificing the whole class. In other words, productive group work is an important part of the gradual release of responsibility, which facilitates student competence and independence.