Miss – an astute and popular primary teacher – split her class into groups, each to write and present a play about the colonisation of Australia.
William* soon presented a swashbuckling action script to his group, who all deemed it seaworthy. Sadly, Miss felt it should have a little more connection to the official history.
Jas* laboured through holidays to create a more historically recognisable script, finding no place for the first work. The group deemed it playable, but Miss told them to merge the two scripts. This demand will do violence to both authorial visions. The children cannot resolve this, as long as they focus on the product.
The children cannot see how to negotiate this. In Vygotsky’s terms, they are no longer in the ‘Zone of Proximal Development’ for this problem and there is no likely success ahead of them. There is no ‘More Knowledgeable Other’ in their group. I imagine two likely outcomes. The teacher could either remove the negotiation task or model it until they do ‘get it’; or, students could find a disappointing solution and so learn that they are inherently incapable of group work.
Cooperative learning is not a natural event but a formal method, involving “positive interdependence, face-to-face interaction, individual accountability, small groups and interpersonal skills, and group self-evaluation.” (Doolittle 1995)
This incident reminds us to:
- Assign roles. It is common for group projects at school to be largely designed by a single member (with guilt felt by all) unless teachers assign individual responsibilities.
- Scaffold social skills. Teachers have a duty to scaffold group-work behaviours at least as much as other skills. The interaction (the process) should be identified as a distinct task and goal.
- Intervene on uncertainty. The teacher is an ex officio member of each group. When a teacher rejects a group’s second attempt, it is time for teacher to participate face-to-face.
- Schedule evaluation. The group needs a guided discussion to draw appropriate conclusions about their process.
*Names have been changed.
References
- Doolittle, PE 1995. Understanding Cooperative Learning through Vygotzky’s Zone of Proximal Development. Lilly National Conference on Excellence in College Teaching (Columbia, SC, June 2-4, 1995). Online at http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=ED384575