Читать книгу Student Learning Communities - Нэнси Фрей - Страница 8

Fortunately, the majority of teachers who have seen collaborative learning flop in the classroom have also seen it succeed. We have witnessed students working together in ways that meet the "learning community" standard, leveraging their collective knowledge, skills, and understandings and consolidating what they know and can do to go further and deeper together than they could have alone.

Consider the example of students in a 5th grade social studies class studying traditional Native American societies and foodways. One of the collaborative learning tasks involved researching food sources and the influence of geography on supply. Each group of learners had a different food source to investigate, and each member of the group had to locate information to share with the group. Each learner had access to digital and print resources, and part of their individual task was to evaluate the credibility of each resource (and some were questionable). Then, as a group, they worked to reach consensus about the information to share out with the rest of class. Each member presented his or her findings, then together they generated a group summary of their assigned food source. Here's an excerpted paragraph from the composition written by the "acorns" group:

Collecting acorns is a complicated task. You need to be able to identify the good from the bad. When you look for acorns in the fall, when they are ripe, they may fall to the ground. When you start to collect them, be sure to collect the ones with their "caps." If you collect the ones without caps, they might have insect larvae inside. This is mainly because an acorn without a cap has probably fallen due to the worm's activity in the acorn, causing it to shake loose of the cap. You also have to look carefully at the ones you collect for holes in the acorn's shell, as these will also indicate the presence of a foul acorn.

When asked about their processes, the students explained that one member's contribution shaped the whole group's thinking. "Jonathan was telling us about what he had found out about poisonous plants in his scout troop, and it got all of us thinking about what could be dangerous in the food supply," said Claire. "That's what changed our investigation," added Spencer.

The paragraph they wrote makes sense and conveys accurate and interesting information. But, more important, it illustrates how these learners moved beyond being just another group of students working together on a project—gathering information, consolidating it, presenting it, checking off the steps to task completion. It's a representation of the everyday transformational work of a community of learners, sparked by the new information and perspective introduced by one of its members.

There are also other elements that mark this collaboration as student learning rather than just a group of students working together. The members of the group demonstrated a social sensitivity and willingness to entertain Jonathan's somewhat tangential knowledge. They had to make some rapid decisions about whether the possible shift in direction would be consistent with their shared agreement of success. At some point, leaders emerged from within this community to allocate resources in order to bring the task to completion. Pretty impressive for 10-year-olds. And yet, you can likely identify many similar examples from your own students, not every time they work in groups, perhaps, but at least often enough for you to see what group learning could be, and at least often enough that you keep chasing those outcomes with new group assignments.

The point is, we know student collaboration can be a springboard to better learning—not just academic learning, but social and emotional learning too. And while this exchange took place in a face-to-face classroom, it just as easily could have occurred in a virtual one, with the addition of some collaborative tools allowing students to talk to and write with one another. How can we ensure this happens reliably for all of our students, rather than just some of the time for some of our students? By attending to the six elements that transform a group of students into a student learning community.

An SLC is achieved by design and through effort, not by luck. In order for students to engage in the collaborative learning process (see Figure 1.2), we, their teachers, need to provide them with the necessary conditions, tools, and supports. That means

 Designing experiences and tasks that invigorate learning through academic discourse;

 Attending to academic, social, and emotional learning;

 Fostering shared agreements of individual and group success;

 Using thoughtful teaming practices to build cognitive, metacognitive, and emotional regulation skills;

 Leveraging peer supports to amplify learning; and

 Activating all students' leadership skills in order to enhance their ability to succeed—alone and together.