It is always suggested that it would be a good idea if students took part in some activities during a lesson in pairs or groups. Obviously this is often unavoidable in drama and PE (assuming you count a sports team as “a group”). The reasons given are usually something along the lines of claiming that it teaches them important social skills such as cooperation, or that you learn better in a group due to being able to talk with your peers.
Of course, this is nonsense. If you want to learn how to cooperate effectively with others, then the last place you’d start is in a group of teenagers being made to do school work. This is like saying the best way to learn how to make pork sausages is by being imprisoned in a pig farm with a half-dozen rabbis. Putting together people who are neither experienced at doing something, or particularly inclined to want to do it, is not how you learn to do that something. Of course, it would be useful to for a surly teenager to practice teamwork skills. Letting him or her join a team of adults who already know how to work in a team would be a great educational experiences. Forcing them into a group of other surly teenagers and letting them fight it out amongst themselves over who is to blame for getting nothing done is less constructive.
The first problem is even getting them into groups. Many students will not sit near each other or talk to each other. The second problem is to get them to agree to do the task at hand. Getting them to work can be tricky at the best of times, but by putting them together you have ensured that if you are going to punish them for not working then you’d have to punish all of them equally. It’s a pretty safe bet that no teacher will risk antagonising the remaining good kids in that way, not least because it would be hard to justify that to parents. This is made worse by those who feel that they should refuse to work in protest at being in a group with somebody they don’t like. Finally, even if it is accepted that the group will carry out the work, it will not be accepted that they should all contribute. Teenagers are naturally hierarchical. It will be assumed that the dominant child should do everything if the activity looks enjoyable, or nothing if it looks like hard work. If the task involves writing you can see this in action. If Her Ladyship enjoys writing she grabs the pen. If His Lordship doesn’t enjoy it, he will grab it anyway, only to pass it to one of the serfs. Whichever way round it is, only one child will do most of the work. Far from teaching them how to cooperate, all that’s happened is that they’ve had yet another chance to develop their dysfunctional patterns of non-cooperation.
Now we may consider the more specific claim that they might learn more from this farce. It is a bit of a no-brainer that studying is generally done more effectively individually, but with significant exceptions. The suggestion that they might learn in groups or pairs is entirely based on the idea that discussion between children is inherently educational. Now, it is impossible to deny that discussing how to answer a question with somebody is often helpful. The strange idea here is that discussing it with somebody who knows roughly as little as you do, is going to be more educational than discussing it with the graduate who has been explaining for years, and is employed to explain it to you, This is, of course, another one of those dumbing down ideas that is based on the fantasy that children have nothing to learn from experts. Naturally, discussing something with an idiot is mainly a way of sharing misconceptions and mistakes. It is the exact opposite of how we learn best, which is from authoritative sources. This is, of course, why teachers spend half their lives telling kids not to talk, not to cooperate, and not to pay attention to each others’ answers. It is also why teachers, even after all these years of “knit-your-own-yoghurt” methods are still called “teachers” and not “facilitators” or “learning consultants”.
However, even by making this argument I am naively assuming that if you put children together in a group and tell them to talk about something, they will. Why on earth would they do that? No matter what your subject, no matter how exciting, there are always going to be a hundred and one other things that are more interesting to talk about. With a large class, and normal secondary school age children, no teacher can control the direction of seven or eight simultaneous conversations. Teachers have a job on their hands at the best of times encouraging students to work rather than chat, it becomes impossible to do when the work itself involves chatting. Like so many other fashionable educational ideas, group-work is based on the belief that every child is basically the sort of willing, obedient individual (in fact the type of student that our school system so effectively marginalises when they do exist) rather than the uncooperative chav personality that they are, in practice, forced to become in order to survive.
As ever in teaching, these sorts of patterns of behaviour aren’t just instinctive, they will have been learned over many years of being made to work in groups by idiot teachers who didn’t really care about learning trying and failing to get some group-work done. They will have already learnt that group-work is effectively an extension of breaktime, in which you get to chat as much as you like and the teacher occasionally comes round and asks why nothing has been done (but not too often because none of the other groups will have done anything either, and the teacher will have spent five minutes trying to calm down the group whose members were trying to kill each other or the child that had a tantrum the moment they discovered who they would be working with). No teacher achieves anything much in group-work outside those areas mentioned earlier where they have had to get used to cooperating, like in drama or playing team sports. Even then you can see problems developing: kids will fight over who is to be in their group, and only experience enables the teachers of those subjects to manage the situation. Most (but not all) teachers dread getting a cover in those subjects.
As for every other subject, the pressure is always there to do get children to work in groups or pairs, for reasons of variety as much as anything else. As a conscientious professional who is full of confidence in anything that’s recommended by people who don’t even teach anymore, I incorporate some kind of group-work into all of my lessons. Those parts of the lesson where they have to sit in silence and listen to me, I consider to be a form of group-work. What’s particularly good about this type of group-work it is that they don’t even have to sit with their groups, or know who else is in their group, in order to do it. Another possibility is simply to ensure that all of you group-work is done in groups of one.
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August 3rd, 2008 at 4:25 pm
[...] got a real laugh out of this post from Scenes From The Battleground. Go over and read it - see if it doesn’t make you grin. Here are some highlights: If you want [...]
August 3rd, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Spot on Andrew, as highlighted by the free for all chaos that was “enterprise day”; the ‘good’ kids doing the stuff noone else wants to do, the dominant kids doing the fun stuff and lots of chat about big brother (as well as the odd hissy fit).
August 4th, 2008 at 3:22 am
An amazing depressing description of how groupwork can go wrong. In my experience there are environments and student cultures in which group work is a valuable part of consolidation of learned knowledge, but this has two prerequesites:
1) Groups consist of students who have some commitment to achievement/ learning - this may mean post compulsory education only in some situations
2) The task is clearly defined, roles are clearly defined and the the deadlines for sections of the task are defined, and the task is of understood value to the students taking part.
If one of these conditions is not met, the situation can descend into the pointless anarchy that you describe. In fact, as a Teacher of Science, I have heard of and seen worse in experiment/ practical lessons with events such as:
*Pipettes in bunsen tubes to create a stream of pressurised gas which can form a relatively effective flame thrower
*Multiple power supply packs wired together to form a significant voltage or current supply to allow students to weld lab equipment together
*Biology dissections where the aerodynamic properties of the subject are demonstrated, devolving into a dystopian food fight
Fortunately, I was called in to deal with these rather than have them happen in my classes, but I will raise your groupwork session disaster tales with science experiment catastrophies, and wait to here your response…
August 4th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
I think OA’s description of group work is good, as an NQT and having done some supply i know that group work can easily be wrecked by a class. Like Aus andrew i’m a science teacher and know that practicals can be seen as a way of terning lesson time into social time.
I had a lesson with one year 11 group, not even practical mind, in which some lads thought it was funny to set fire to the back end of the paper airplane one of them had just made and throw it. I looked up from helping a pupil to see the smoldering projectile collide with the back of another pupils head. Given the stupidity i couldn’t blame her for the language she used at the offending boys. End result, hours detention with the HoD.
August 4th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Brilliant!
August 5th, 2008 at 1:48 am
I love the humor. I have actually had students learn something in group work, but like everything else one size does not fit all.
August 5th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Do you know what I think is wrong with your blog, oldandrew? You know by now that having taught in one of the nationally bottom-ten inner-city comps for many years (as well as very much nicer schools) I recognise with startling clarity everything you describe in your blog as factually accurate and devoid of emotional exaggeration. What’s wrong is that you sound depressed, despairing and frustrated by it all to the point where you are very near to washing your hands of the whole thing. As I did
I think many teachers who recognise similar situations in their own careers resent or fear your bitter despair. It makes them sound as if they are whistling in the dark, pissing in the rain. Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Wasting their time. Fooling no-one but themselves that anything they do will “make a difference” and affirm their identity.
August 6th, 2008 at 12:59 am
I’m not despairing. The point of all this is to change it. The problem we have in schools is the belief that this is all there can be so we’d better put a brave face on it. The point of the blog is to point out that far from being inevitable this is an absurdity, that to get to where we are has taken a lot of people, over a lot of years being very, very stupid. I want to help people believe in change, and the biggest obstacle to change is in my view the denial of the current reality.
August 6th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
It isn’t the reality for lots of people though. At Leafy Lane Grammar, the teachers used to presume I made up Tales From The Crypt for the purpose of entertaining them. Just on the subject of group work, I’ve taught in schools where group work is a guaranteed success. They’re not teaching each other: they’re applying the skills I have already taught them to work through a task. They are in school: they expect to work and their work ethic and self-esteem drive them forward. Anecdotes of group work gone seriously pear-shaped only lead them to cast nasturtiums on the classroom management of the teacher or failure to apply a sanction that bites: a phone call home or a detention!
Compare that with the carefully-planned, time-consumingly-resourced and earnest efforts of teachers at Hell High, who have been told they will do practicals/group work in x% of their lessons, and invariably watch that time and effort go to shit. They KNOW what the problem is but more importantly they know WHOSE the problem is: theirs. Until is becomes the problem of someone who has the power to change things, that’s exactly where it will stay.
August 6th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Well my point is that we have to push those with the power to change things, and we have to take some of that power for ourselves. We also need to raise our voices when people waste our time with that “the teacher must be at fault” stuff that people always come up with when they want to avoid the truth of what’s happening.
As long as even one teacher realises “I am not alone” and decides to express their opinion publicly then my blog will have done some good. I also want to encourage people committed to change to start rising up the ranks (rather than giving up before they are 30) and running schools. Box of chocolates to the first person who uses one of my blog posts in INSET training (but you will have to prove it).
August 6th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
[...] post is a humorous account of the pointlessness of problems inherent with trying to make students do groups work. He makes a [...]
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August 6th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
“As long as even one teacher realises “I am not alone” … then my blog will have done some good.”
Gawd bless you, Sir.
Another thought on the subject is that the sort of person who is likely to take enough of an interest in their kids’ education to have got them into a decent school, may well presume that the status quo at the school their kids attend is general, with hellholes being few and extreme cases. The parents of kids at hellholes, although they might not like what they’ve got, are nonetheless stuck with it and often don’t feel empowered enough to complain.
August 7th, 2008 at 1:19 am
You aren’t depressed. You just speak with passion. And that’s because you love what you do. I wish people could see the difference.
August 7th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
I often agree with Lily but I must say I don’t find the tone of the blog is depressed.
The best thing about the TES website for most of my career and for this website for however long it has been going is it does make me feel like I’m not alone and that gives me strength to keep going and also to not blame myself for all the craziness.
I ran a website for pgce students for a couple of years just because I thought I’d get to them before the loonies in the teacher training system did and show them there was an alternative way of looking at things before they were brain washed, but it was too much work and I was burning myself out so I gave it up.
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