Enjoy reading Patrick's description.
Regards,
Ted tpanitz@cape.com
From: Patrick Boylan <boylan@uniroma3.it>
Hi,
I teach English (language, culture) at the Universities of Rome and
Perugia. Bob Aiken, a visiting professor here, forwarded your questions
sent 5 Jan 1998. Since I try to foster cooperative learning, I thought
I'd
share my views.
You ask to share experiences with cooperative learning and ask three
specific questions.
The first is:
>I would love to hear about your experiences with collaborative
>learning. In particular: How do your students react to collaborative
>learning activities over time during a semester?
Very well. Right to the end -- so there's no need to "sell" them on
participating. They're Italian and so sociable, of course. But the real
answer is they have chosen languages because they want to travel,
interact
with people, understand factual and literary works in English first hand
and, most of all, "feel" what it means to live another culture. So I
help
them form research/study/practice groups that let them attain these
goals
or at least acquire the skills they see as relevant in order to attain
these goals. I don't have to motivate them. They study because they
find
that they actually learn what they had come to the University to learn
in
the first place.
>What do you do to orient your students to the collaborative learning
>environment?
The first two weeks are spent weaning students from the idea that I've
got
all the answers. In fact, they are amazed to find out that not only do
I
not have all the answers, I don't even have all the questions. THEY do,
since they're the ones who enrolled in the class to learn something they
must have thought answered needs or curiosities THEY had (not me).
The following two weeks are used to simulate group work in class -- a
group of 5 goes through some activity in front of the others: learning a
role
from a recorded play, trying to transcribe a sound track from a film
seen
in class, formulating explanations for the "grammatical anomalies"
encountered in the English of the singers whose CD's they have brought
to
class and then comparing their folk-linguistic explanations with what
standard English grammars say... As I was saying, THEY are the ones who
came to learn something so, although I have a vast potential program of
learning objectives and materials, what I actually do depends on what
the
students feel they need to know. (Some things are required for
curriculum
continuity reasons, but they can be slipped into the overall program
which
we decide on together).
As the students work in groups I intervene, mostly trying to get the
group
leader to do her job. Leaders are understandably hesitant (at first) to
correct peers, especially with 60 other peers listening in. (That's
right:
65 students in all -- now you see why collaborative learning and group
work is necessary; one teacher cannot possibly interact with that many
learners.)
The group leader's job is to act as a monitor: making sure the task gets
done, encouraging participation from everyone, making sure each
participant's contributions are clear and appropriate. The student
monitor
follows the "technical guidelines" learned the first two weeks and
dealing
with methodology: how to guess the mumbled words you hear in a song (and
thus what "phoneme assimilation" is), how to maintain eye contact in
playacting (and thus what "pragmatic intent" means in practice), how to
use "descriptive" instead of "normative" phraseology (and thus
scientific
terminology) in commenting marginal speech forms, etc., besides the
obvious rules for good group dynamics.
After doing a homework project as collaborative learning (mostly at the
students' homes -- that's why groups are formed with students who live
close to each other), students come to class to show what they've
learned.
There's a lesson on Wednesday, then collaborative learning at someone's
home or in an empty classroom on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday, then
lesson on Friday, then collaborative learning lasting until the
following Wednesday. After a couple of weeks at this pace we go back to
teacher-led teaching with individual homework assignments: that's where
students learn more "technical guidelines", etc. Then it's back to two
or three weeks of lessons plus collaborative work in groups. Sometimes
groups meet and begin the projects in class, 13 groups of 5 students
each scattered around the main lecture hall: it gets noisy but it
permits group leaders to call me over to solve problems they can't
handle on their own.
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