It is essential that people collaborate – of course it is – and providing young people with plenty of opportunities to collaborate at school through, for example, organising group work activities in lessons, feels like a no-brainer. After all, biologically primary learning (learning to talk and walk and share and so on) is a hugely social experience, and collaboration drives much of both the social world and the world of work, doesn’t it? So what’s the ‘problem’?
The problem is that much of the learning we do at school – certainly at secondary level – is mostly biologically secondary learning – what probably used to be called ‘book learning’ or the ‘Three Rs’. This kind of learning is different from the learning that we do in ‘the real world’; for one thing, almost all of it will not be ‘picked up’ or imbibed as we go about our daily lives – you aren’t learning to read by chance, you aren’t solving quadratic equations or learning to play ‘Für Elise’ on the piano on the hoof, and so on. If we accept that premise, it takes us into questions of pedagogy: given the very limited resource of subject teaching time, what’s the best way of helping students learn about the causes of the 2nd World War? Or Supply and Demand? Or chemical reactions?
For me, the ‘problem’ with collaborative learning is not that it can’t be made to work – it can, and teachers do. It’s mostly that it’s far less efficient than teacher-led learning, for most of the stuff we teach at school. Learning only happens inside the brains of each one of us as an individual, so each one of us has to engage with new information by thinking hard about it, and then we have to retrieve that information periodically in the future to help it stick. Collaborative learning – or group work – risks detaching us as individuals from that important personal responsibility for learning.
There are other potential problems with collaborative learning: it invites the lazy to be lazy; done too early, it can resemble ‘the blind leading the blind’ with students stumbling around for ‘the answer’; it invariably advantages the already-advantaged, since young people who already know more and who are more motivated and/or conscientious are far more likely to take a lead in and fully engage in group work activities – more worryingly, the flip-side is also true: the already disadvantaged are further disadvantaged by the vagaries of group work. You can hide in a group; you can leave it to others; you can day-dream and chat and waste time in a hundred ways. Or not, of course.
There are ways of mitigating these potential problems: we can ensure we only start group work when students are ready – that is, when they have the necessary background knowledge; we can spend a lot of time designing high-quality group-work activities that include mechanisms to ensure individual accountability; we can circulate like humming-birds while students are group-working, pecking away at anyone who shows the slightest inclination to slacken off or leave it to others; and we can move continuously from group to group answering their questions and providing feedback to push them along.
Or we could just teach them all using Rosenshine’s Principles. Explaining things, modelling and scaffolding, whole-class questioning, guided practice, feedback, and independent practice.
Before you vehemently disagree, there are several important qualifications to this essentially beware-of-group-work statement:
First, I recognise that collaborative learning is a core feature of the curriculum in a number of subjects – music, drama and sport jump to mind – no doubt there are others. If the subject specification requires it, then teachers must design high-quality opportunities for students to collaborate – team-play is clearly a core activity in PE, for example. Second, I absolutely recognise that done at the right point in the learning phase, group work can add to the learning experience; the ‘right point’ would be when students have largely mastered the ‘knowledge’ so they have plenty to think with. And third, pair work is probably not technically group work, but I do think it can be a very efficient and effective learning mechanism. Think pair share, for example, is quick and easy to organise – far quicker and far easier than large-group activity. And it’s harder to ‘hide’ in a pair.
The best balance is probably one where the majority of the time students are working on their own or as a whole class (e.g. in whole class question and answer work), with a good deal of pair work and, at the right time and carefully organised, a small amount of larger-group work.
