Mentor materials
Stimulate thinking - collaborative work
Intended outcomes
The intended outcomes of this topic are for Early Career Teachers to:
Learn that:
- Paired and group activities can increase pupil success, but to work together effectively pupils need guidance, support and practice
Learn how to stimulate pupil thinking and check for understanding, by:
- Considering the factors that will support effective collaborative or paired work (e.g. familiarity with routines, whether pupils have the necessary prior knowledge and how pupils are grouped)
- Providing scaffolds for pupil talk to increase the focus and rigour of dialogue.
Activities
Reflection on learning (10 minutes)
Ask your ECT about what group or paired work they have done in their lessons since the last topic.
- What worked well?
- How do they know?
- What are the main challenges in group / paired work?
- How have they overcome these?
Explain that in this topic you will be planning for effective collaboration or paired work. Even though the ECT is likely already grouping pupils and may have experienced good success with it, this topic will help to refine the practice and ensure that every group task is effective and leads to successful learning for pupils.
The factors that support effective collaborative or paired work (20 minutes)
Read the following:
Effective group work does require a significant amount of preparation, and a number of preconditions have to be met beforehand in order for it to be effective.
- Pupils must be able to cooperate with one another, and to provide each other with help in a constructive way.
- Pupils often lack sharing skills, which means that they have difficulty sharing time and materials and can try to dominate the group. This can be alleviated by teaching sharing skills, for example by using the ‘round robin’ technique.
- Other pupils may lack participation skills. This means they find it difficult to participate in group work because they are shy or uncooperative. This can be alleviated by structuring the task so that pupils have to play a particular role in the group.
- Pupils may also lack communication skills. This means they are not able to effectively communicate their ideas to others, obviously making it difficult for them to function in a cooperative group.
- Communication skills, such as paraphrasing may need to be explicitly taught to pupils before small group work can be used.
- Some pupils may lack listening skills. This can frequently be a problem with younger pupils who will sat waiting their turn to contribute without listening to other pupils. This can be counteracted by making pupils paraphrase what the pupil who has contributed before them has said before allowing them to contribute.
(Muijs and Reynolds, 2017)
Questions for discussion:
- To what extent do you explicitly teach pupils in your class skills required for group work?
- How might you go about doing this? There are suggestions in the text, can you think of any others?
Suggested dialogue for mentors:
There are some other factors that aid effective collaborative or paired work:
- Familiarity with routines
- Pupils’ prior knowledge
- How pupils are grouped.
For each one, let’s discuss why that factor might support or hinder effective collaborative or paired work.
Possible answers:
- Familiarity with routines: If you develop specific routines around how group work will work, then pupils will understand what is expected of them. For example, there are always success criteria shared for group work at the beginning and reviewed at the end. Consistently praise behaviours that you want to see through group work – e.g. good listening skills, cooperation etc.
- Pupils’ prior knowledge: Be careful in your planning to make sure that the work the pupils are being asked to do sufficiently builds on prior knowledge. If pupils are being asked to do something for group work that is entirely new for them, there will be significant limits on how successful they can be in it. How pupils are grouped: If pupils are always in the same group, they will lack the opportunity to learn from other pupils and hear other viewpoints. If pupils suspect that the group they are in is a ‘low attainment’ group they might feel demotivated to try. Mixing groups up to avoid the idea that groupings are fixed is very important.
Planning a group work activity:
For a lesson that is coming up, the ECT should plan with their mentor a group work activity. They need to consider:
- How will the pupils be grouped?
- Will there be roles for pupils?
- What are the success criteria for the group work?
- How will they communicate the success criteria and instructions for the task?
- Does there need to be a pre-group work activity, which ensures pupils have the requisite knowledge to complete the group work successfully?
- What resources will be provided to support the group work?
- How will the ECT monitor the group work?
Provide scaffolds for pupil talk to increase the focus and rigour of dialogue (20 minutes)
Look at Handout 9.2 together, which gives a range of ideas for ways to scaffold pupil talk to increase the focus and rigour of dialogue.
Questions for discussion:
- Have you tried any of these scaffolds? Which ones?
- Are there others you have tried that are not here?
- For a lesson that you have coming up, are there any strategies here that you could use? Which ones?
Reviewing this module (10 minutes)
Ask the ECT what they will do differently as a result of this topic? When will they do it by?
The next topic will be focusing on meeting the needs of individuals without creating unnecessary workload. The ECT will also need to bring a lesson or sequence of lessons along with the accompanying resources they plan to teach in the following week. Discuss this now and agree which resources would be useful to bring.