Group work as voodoo teaching: Fair appraisal or not?

In Teacher Proof, by Tom Bennett, group work is characterised as voodoo teaching:  an approach to learning advocated by armchair educationists, based on theory and evidenced by proxy measurements, while from a teacher perspective there are a considerable number of disadvantages for example, inactivity (disguised), unequal participation and too much social chat.

Don’t these behaviours occur whatever pedagogy a teacher uses for imparting knowledge?

When the aim is to improve teaching and learning oppositional conversations are not helpful. If teachers could be convinced of the value of group work then the disadvantages might morph into barriers to be overcome. However, two misconceptions need to be dismissed at the outset. Firstly, learning is not about accumulating factual knowledge and being able to recall it; understanding the knowledge and making conceptual connections are the key indicators of knowledge acquisition. Secondly, the idea of group work is not that students teach each other. The value of inter student interaction lies in the process od developing their  learning of a topic through verbalising their current level of  understanding while communicating it to other members of the group, and by assessing and/or developing the ideas of their peers. With a 1/30 teacher/student ratio it would not be possible for the teacher to undertake this process with every student.  However, the teacher’s expert knowledge is not wasted, she/he can correct any misunderstandings that persist at group level. 

Hard to learn stuff is cognitively and emotionally painful so there is value in easing the emotional strain.  In the UK we have just witnessed the annual duel between the Oxford and Cambridge university boat crews. Although both Oxford teams won easily (for the first time female crews competed on the same course on the same day, albeit not at the same time) it hasn’t always been the case. The media spend a great deal of time describing the commitment and explaining the endurance required by rowers. In 2007 when the Oxford male crew were not doing so well research was carried out that involved comparing threshold for pain when elite rowers trained individually compared with training together in a virtual boat when the physical effort involved was done collectively [1].  Physical effort is known to stimulate endorphin (opioid) release and it has been shown in other studies that high opiate activity is specific to the areas of the brain associated with mood. Could this finding be translated to a group learning context? Does working on a task collectively provide a more conducive emotional climate for the learning? Is the mood of students enhanced in a way that helps them to tackle the painful business of learning? The unknown is whether collective action without physical exertion is sufficient to achieve a positive effect on mood. I propose that it is a sufficiently important area of inquiry for encouraging further research and encouraging teachers to persevere with group work.

Teachers’ experience of group work in practice is that it can lead to a loss of control and increased disruption. Provided that a school has the technological infrastructure to support forums group work could be done online i.e. mediated by a digital device and associated software. Students would know that the teacher could be monitoring their interactions without being physically co-present in either time or space and that a persistent record of their conversations is available. That should wrest some control back to the teacher.

1.         Cohen, E.E.A., et al., Rowers' high: behavioral synchrony is correlated with elevated pain thresholds. Biology letters, 2009. Evolutionary biology.

Pitching for the VLE : the distance student voice

Neil Selwyn is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Monash and worth following if, like me, you get disturbed by ‘technology for education’ hype.  From reading some of Selwyn’s previous research I have constructed him as a defender of democracy in Education. For December reading 2014 he has posted up an article on his academia site https://monash.academia.edu/NeilSelwyn titled ‘minding our language’ in which he draws a contrast between the ‘complex realities’ of Education and by implication, what it means to be a student, and the ‘ restricted ‘ language of ‘Ed-Tech Speak (he provides a list of 50 ED-Tech Speak terms in the appendix).

So far so very good (and that is largely my overall conclusion). However, I am going to challenge one of his  suggestions; that it would be more appropriate to refer to ‘virtual learning environments’ (VLE) as ‘teaching management systems’. I make this challenge in the context of one genre, the distance student, by drawing from experience as both a distance student and a distance teacher.  For distance students at the Open University UK (OUUK), its VLE means much more than a ‘teaching management system’. For these students it is their campus, a place where they can get access to other students and all those other intellectual assets that are a significant aspect of being a student in Higher Education. For many the VLE is their University substantiated, a place where they can feel that they belong.  Previously that ‘sense of belonging’ to a University was only fleetingly and marginally achieved. By the  way - 'belonging' is another term that Selwyn is suspicious about when used by Ed_Tech )  

Distance learning, as pioneered by the Open Universities of the world, has democratised education for many and when technology is harnessed appropriately it can make the sense of being a student ‘real’.  A well crafted VLE, i.e. one  that is much more than a teaching management system, is the key component. So while I totally agree with Selwyn’s appraisal of Ed-Tech Speak as a ‘powerful means of advancing the interests and agendas of some social groups over others‘  (Selwyn, 2014, p.2) I wanted to speak up on behalf of the the VLE, as situated in the history of Open and Distance Learning.

Selwyn, N. (2014). Minding_our_Language. https://monash.academia.edu/NeilSelwyn.