Robert D. Marcus, Nonreaders Anonymous: Reading History Collaboratively The History Teacher (Long Beach, Calif.) 33 no4 453-68 Ag 2000
This article will show that by completely reorganizing my classes according to techniques largely borrowed from the literature of collaborative learning, I not only ended boring and arduous lectures, but was able to give students like the one I quoted above the opportunity to do something with their reading that was lacking when I had simply given out reading assignments as a background for lecture and discussion in class. And results suggest that it improved students' ability to read the assigned material and to use it in speaking, writing and thinking critically about it. The students to which I refer in this essay are largely freshmen and transfer students in an only slightly selective state college. The average freshman graduated in about the sixtieth percentile of his high school class (with an approximately eighty-four average) and scored a little over 1000 on the College Board Scholastic Aptitude Test. Transfer students--who make up sixty five percent of the college's graduates--have slightly weaker preparation but have the advantage of being a few years older than the freshmen. Historians with their sixteen-plus grade reading levels may have forgotten how difficult is the prose we ask students to read. Most difficult of all are primary sources with their frequently problematic vocabulary and syntax, obscure internal references, unfamiliar systems of thought, uncertain historical context, and often opaque connection to present concerns. But unskilled or inexperienced readers find difficulty even with the prose of the best textbooks. Historical prose lays endless traps for weak or lazy readers. Historians extensively qualify what they say leaving the student the task of fastening onto the author's main point rather than the qualifiers. While most students--judging from their writing--are somewhat comfortable with block quotations, historical prose imbeds quotations into the author's sentences, making the student search for the author's opinion amidst different views from the past. Unlike students, historians make it a point of honor to cite opposing opinions. This requires students to learn the rhetorical cues that separate the author's views from other, sometimes only subtly different opinions. Historians do not write in the straightforward expository prose you find in many other fields. Rather than mechanically stating generalizations and then giving examples, they require students to construe the sinuous ways they weave together the general and the specific through their use of such literary strategies as irony, metaphor, analogy, symbolization, even humor. Finally, with few simple lessons left to teach, historians write prose which often assumes levels of moral maturity that press young college students to rise above rigid rule bound judgments or crippling relativism to appreciate different sides of a historical dilemma while committing themselves to a position. There are some obvious ways of improving students' comprehension of the assigned readings: A less obvious one I simply stumbled upon by turning to collaborative learning, which led me to organize class work so that students saw other students (i.e., not just the teacher) learning the material by reading. The teaching methods I had previously used endlessly demonstrated that while the teacher could always perform this feat, only a small percentage of students who were willing to try to answer discussion questions in class sometimes could. I never had been successful in getting a large number of students to join this select competition. However, I soon came to realize that the core of collaborative learning was to put all the students in highly structured situations where they could teach others what they had learned by reading. This is the closest history comes to being an applied field: a means of teaching, communicating, story telling, transmitting traditions. Students--as the distribution of majors nationally demonstrates--believe in applications. The collaborative learning classroom becomes a place where students must apply their reading to problems presented by the assigned exercises, simple descriptive ones at first, but eventually complicated ones demanding critical thinking and moral judgment. Putting students into groups requires some care. I prefer reasonably gender balanced groups of six or seven so that taking absences into account you can expect at least five people to be working together. Five seems the ideal number to me and to many others who use these techniques. Some instructors do fine with random, temporary, or self-selected groups. I've found my best success with permanent groups that I put together through the results of a questionnaire and a reading-writing skills test administered on the first day of class. The questionnaire asks for class year, high school average or college GPA, vocational goal, a brief essay in self description, and year of graduation from high school. This last is the most important question, since I find it valuable to sprinkle the older students, who often provide leadership, throughout the groups. The reading-writing test--a one page essay on a brief document--along with the self-description enables me loosely to rate students' academic abilities on a five point scale so I can try to make the groups academically equal (going from the strongest and most interesting to the weakest in each group). There's a lot of guessing in the process, but not outright guessing. It usually works, although I remember vividly but not at all fondly the very few completely clueless groups I've formed over the years. Even one good student makes a huge difference. Training students in group process would undoubtedly be useful, but like most historians I haven't the skill to do it. Simply handing out a sheet of sample behaviors, setting up a situation in which students have to practice the skills, and reminding them to do so constantly for the first few weeks, seems quite adequate to get almost all groups working pretty well. My instruction sheet consists mainly of typical sentences that students might say as they take the different roles: Encourager ("Good point, Allison"); Gatekeeper ("Let's hear from someone else. Selena?"); Checker ("Kelly, let's make sure you followed that last one."); Taskmaster ("Interesting, Mark, but we have to move on."); Recorder ("Have we reached a conclusion?"). A simple form administered occasionally enables groups to process how well they are doing and how they can improve. Two questions are plenty: 1) List three things that went well in working together on this exercise; and 2) Suggest one thing your group could do better next time. At first, I offered elaborate explanations of collaborative learning, but found it both unsuccessful and unnecessary. Short of making defenestration a course requirement, students will try almost anything you confidently announce that you want them to do, especially if, like collaborative learning, it sounds more interesting than the alternative. They will even regularly bring to class the books assigned for a given day, a necessity for collaborative learning exercises. And you can never give students too much paper: the evidence of forethought in lots of clear instructions feels like and is caring. In a characteristic collaborative exercise, students receive in advance an exercise to do as part of a homework assignment and then to complete with their group in the next class. Usually the exercise is designed to create mutual interdependence within the group by assigning students different questions or a different mix of questions for their homework. As groups complete the exercise, with occasional kibitzing by the instructor who roams around the room, students see some of their group (even themselves) succeed in getting answers by interpreting the reading. They see, as well, failed attempts and experience how these failures lead to reconsideration of the text and eventually to interpretations on which the group can agree. In a brief whole class session, the groups report out by a variety of mechanisms--several are detailed in these pages--depending on the exercise. We go over the questions, referring back to the reading to deal with difficulties. I ask groups to mark questions they struggled over and then have another group that thinks it got the answer respond. Then, either the reporting out itself becomes the evaluation or the groups slide their chairs back into standard row formation (an odd seating arrangement I use only for quizzes and exams) for a five question quiz or to write a brief essay. For quizzes, which I generally use only with textbook chapters, once the papers are collected, I read the questions and students call out the answers, leading to more discussion when people have differing answers. These daily evaluations are graded by a simple scheme in which half the grade is the individual student's test score and half is the average of the group's grade with an extra weighting thrown in to credit overall high group achievement, a system that teaches students to take seriously their own role as teachers within the group. Since group work counts for twenty-five percent of the grade, each exercise is worth somewhere around one percent of the grade: enough, I've found, to have students take them with utter seriousness. You may be now be fearing that the classroom will have turned into a paper airplane arena with vast stretches of time wasted handing out and collecting papers. No, an extremely simple system using an ordinary manila folder for each group moves assignments and exams back and forth between instructor and students within practically no classroom time. Students find their individual and group grades on the inside front cover of the folder. They check off roles on a sheet on the inside back cover until everyone has had at least two experiences with each role. On the outside I place a photograph of the group that I take as soon as enrollment settles down. I then have students write their names so I can link them to their pictures. As I wander around to the groups, I pick up the folders and get a fighting chance to learn student names. From the second class period onwards, students are placed into their groups and assigned a section of the room as their permanent seats. When I come into class I hand out the folders which contain previous quizzes or essays, an updating of the grade sheet, and any instructions or new assignments. Usually I have had students purchase a "Course Pack" of exercises at the bookstore, minimizing the number of handouts in the class, but for the first several runs through the course, I handed out the next day's assignments at every class. This takes a few minutes before class, and in class, you are handing out six to eight folders rather than forty to fifty separate sheets. And latecomers don't come scrounging around your desk for assignments. They get them from whoever in their group has the folder. After quizzes or short essays or when assignments are due students place them in the folders for me to find after class. The folder becomes a magical lifeline to the group. Students begin the class by seeing how well they and their group did in the last class and getting whatever they need for this or the next class and they end the class by placing work into the folder and seeing that it gets back to me. When they are engaged in a group project, material stays in the folder unless they plan a meeting outside the class hour (which isn't required but happens in many groups) so that if anyone is absent, that student's material is available to the group. With my urging, students write their phone numbers in the folder so that their group colleagues can reach them as necessary. In short, the folders serve many valuable purposes at the cost of writing a few numbers a second time when you enter grades. Students within the group, then, know each other's grades. This is an advantage: the daily grades from quizzes and other exercises plus an hour exam within the first four weeks (for which the group has some common study exercises but which is taken and graded individually) disabuse students of the notion that they will benefit like hitchhikers in someone else's car. Students quickly discover that the collaborative learning class is like any other: if they do not work they pay the price in their grades. They also hear from members of their group when their poor performance keeps the group from reaping the extra rewards built into the weighting system. And other ways can be built into the evaluation scheme for the group to censure lazy students. Groups often go beyond the official boundaries to develop ingenious shaming mechanisms that sometimes have positive effects on the student and always do wonders for group morale. A good example of a collaborative learning exercise is "Expert Groups." This procedure puts a powerful emphasis on the responsibility of students to teach other students, gives everyone a chance to work with people from other groups, breaks up class time by moving students to another part of the room and then back, and guarantees that practically everyone will take a leadership role in turn in the group. Most of all, it is among the most intense of reading exercises since it makes students responsible before two different groups for what they read. The easiest way to explain the technique is to copy the completely unoriginal instructions I borrowed long ago from the collaborative learning literature by a route I no longer remember. INSTRUCTIONS FOR EXPERT GROUPS Expert groups are created by assigning each member of a group the responsibility of learning a given piece of material in depth, then teaching it to the remainder of the group. Thus, each member of the group becomes an expert on a portion of the material that all must learn.STEPS FOR CREATING AND USING EXPERT GROUPS The questions assigned are straightforward. For a reading on the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire I ask such questions as: What were the successes and failures of the shirtwaist makers' strike of 1909-1910?; What were the effects of the fire? "Expert Groups" is representative collaborative learning, an exercise in carefully pre-programed chaos. Students are first focused on the piece of the assignment they have to become "experts" on. Working with other "experts," they perfect their understanding of the question and decide how to teach it. They then teach this material to their own group and are in turn taught other material by their group colleagues. And always, they know that they are both responsible to the group for teaching and responsible to themselves for learning all the material. Typical of all collaborative learning exercises, this takes up a good bit of class time the first time through. After that, students work rapidly and well. At the end, going around group by group, asking people who were in expert group two to answer question one, those from group three to take question two and the like provides a form of whole class reporting out. Or you can, if the exercise has gone well, skip the whole class process since students will have already been through two group discussions and their individual reporting. If you are willing to invest a great deal of time on teaching students to seek perfection and in creating a unique bonding experience, evaluate the result of "Expert Groups" by selecting a student at random to answer a question not covered by his or her expert group and assigning the entire group the grade that answer merits. This becomes an explicit evaluation of both teaching and learning and insures that the group will labor endlessly to teach every member the material. Although I've become generally competent at setting time limits on group activity and shortening them as the term progresses, I've never been able to enforce time limits using this form of evaluation. I make a point of doing this once a semester, but rarely more often than that, usually with "Expert Groups" but occasionally with another exercise that allows this technique. A less well known exercise, the PIG, is the ingenious invention of Ken L. Weatherbie of Delmar College. This is an effective device for teaching students to read textbook material and a powerful tool for helping groups to coalesce. Standing roughly for Particulars Into Generalizations, it is described in detail in Weatherbie's account in Cooperative Learning and College Teaching, 6:1 (Fall, 1995) 11-13. I use the PIG, modified to fit my own teaching style and goals, several times during the term. It makes an excellent exercise to assign at the beginning of the term while I am working out the groups between the first and second classes, offering an intense and highly structured introduction to working in the newly formed groups during the second class period. The PIG is an inductive exercise, teaching students to put together particulars in a text to lead them to the generalizations the author is making. It cues them where to look and by forcing them to perform such critical reading activities as distinguishing main ideas from secondary ones, qualifications from primary assertions, and the author's point from ideas she is eliminating, is an excellent reading skills builder. PIGs also teach a miniversion of an important writing skill--summarizing. As with most collaborative learning exercises, example is easier to give than description. My instructions to students in the first class handout are as follows: PIG SHEETS PIG sheets help you read the text by focusing you on key material and identifying relationships that tie that material together. They ask you to identify and state the relationship between three items in a list of four. The fourth item also appears in the reading assignment, but does not relate to the other three items in the same way they relate to each other. Such categorizing of information is fundamental to critical thinking. You have been doing this all your life--identifying something by putting it is relationship to something else. On the PIG sheet, you are to find the relationship of three of the four items in each set, line out the item that doesn't fit the same way, indicate the page on which you found them, then write a complete and accurate statement which uses the three items and summarizes at least in part the section from which the three items came. I then go on to give some examples. The one I will reproduce here is based on the following representative paragraph from a standard United States history textbook, David Burner, Virginia Barnhard, Stanley I. Kutler, Firsthand America, 4th edition, Vol. II, p. 509: THE GREAT SURGE ECONOMIC GROWTH
This looks simple enough, but in fact students frequently have trouble with it and require some group discussion to get it right. They have to notice, for example, that the longest sentence in this paragraph (beginning "The textile industry...") is qualified both by the "also" within the sentence and the "But as of 1860" that begins the next one. And in the final sentence, a transition to the next paragraph, one has to note the qualifying dependent clause not to be misled by the main clause's assertion about the United States as "the world's largest industrial power." Students work on a number of such questions as part of their homework. After the first class in which students are assigned odd or even numbered questions according to where their last name falls in the alphabet, the PIG sheets come in A, B, and C varieties covering some common questions and some that are unique to the particular PIG sheet. Then they work with their group in class on a GINNY sheet (Weatherbie's "Big PIG") containing all the questions. As explained above, the groups get a chance to hear about questions that they found difficult, then take a brief quiz on the material. Weatherbie gives an excellent evaluation of the benefits of this exercise: PIGs help students both individually and collectively use reasoning rather than rote memorization as a way to learn from their texts. PIGs encourage students to be aware of relationships exposed in the text: cause and effect, comparison and contrast, sequence, part-whole, etc. PIGs enable students individually to prepare for a group discussion, and they generate and sustain a group's discussion of the text (promotive interaction). They also help students construct and defend an argument based on their reading of the text and to express varied perspective on what the text says and means. [Cooperative Learning and College Teaching, 6:1 (Fall, 1995), 12]Whereas the PIG begins with a list and ends with a general statement, many of the exercises I use specifically aim to teach students to develop lists from their reading. These lists are powerful tools to focus reading and can serve remarkably sophisticated purposes in building arguments and leading students to higher intellectual skills such as synthesis and evaluation. During the course of the semester, several exercises are introduced with language such as the following: Probably the most common and useful way of organizing information in some preliminary fashion is by making lists. They are, in fact, remarkably powerful intellectual tools for finding your way through a reading (or a supermarket).The instructions then go on to specify what kind of list students are to generate. Sometimes a list of specific events in chronological sequence is essential, or a list of questions that a passage is attempting to answer, or a list of justifications offered for a policy (and often in a separate question for a conflicting policy), or a list of evidences for a historical interpretation (or two or three, always in separate questions), even lists of adjectives used to describe people (in an exercise about first contact between Americans and Europeans.) By beginning with simple lists and in the course of the term advancing to lists that generate debate and even force students to consider the evidence for interpretations they abhor, students learn to read with increasing sophistication and to avoid the common response of simply skipping over ideas that make them uncomfortable. Here are some examples. The GIP, which works in the opposite way from the PIG, starts with generalizations and asks students to list as briefly as possible evidence for them. Instructions are simple: Historians require evidence for the general statements they make. Indeed in any argument, we ask for particulars as evidence for more general assertions. Below are seven statements about the reading that can be supported by more specific points in the reading. As you read, list briefly the evidence for each of the statements. Then in class you will compare your lists with those of other members of your group and make a master list for the group. You will then be tested on the material.That you do not demonstrate a generalization by a statement equally general seems too obvious to teach until one begins to sample student writing. This exercise, while giving students a way to search a reading, also begins preparing them for taking essay examinations by attaching specific examples to general statements. My favorite form of "reporting out" for this and other list-generating exercises is to bring students to the blackboard. I assign each group a different question from the set of homework questions, mark out spaces on the boards for each group, tell them that they cannot exceed the assigned space, and instruct them to send as many members as they wish to the board until they are satisfied with their lists. If a group has gone off track, I talk quietly to the person at the board and suggest that the group do some reconsidering. Or if they begin writing long sentences, I have them decide what words they can live without to get them to outline more efficiently. Ideally we arrive at crisp lists of causes or effects or the like. Then I usually leave the lists on the board and give as the evaluation a one paragraph essay on a subject other than the one the group had done in detail. When in the next class students find the papers in their group folder with a rough (5 point scale) grade, a comment or two (occasionally more if the paper requires it), and the overall result for the group, I point out that they have just done a mini-rehearsal for the essay question examinations they will face in the course. A more complex exercise in making lists is that of finding questions in a text. Here is a typical introduction to that exercise: FINDING QUESTIONS AS YOU READ One important skill for reading complex material like a textbook successfully is to extract the question or cluster of questions that each subsection is answering. Sometimes questions are explicitly asked in the text: Firsthand America asks in the opening section of Chapter 18 on Trinity Church "How had a church come to be the foremost enemy of tenement reform?" (FA p. 592). More often the questions are implicit. As you read Chapter 18, write down as many questions as you can that are being pursued in each subsection of the chapter.This is an exercise in which you can plainly see the weaker students learning from the stronger ones. A real struggle for numerous students at my institution, extracting questions from a text is quite a manageable task for most groups of five or six students. So most students learn something of this powerful decoding skill which they will have to use in more sophisticated ways later in the course. In their parlance, they are learning "what's the point" of the reading. Overlaps among the questions usually provide a basis for general discussion or I ask groups to volunteer to answer one of the questions. An open book essay with students required to selected a question that another group considered in detail offers a good evaluation. Used early in the term, this reenforces two requirements of the course: that the students are responsible for all sections of the chapter, not just the ones they had to deal with in their groups in class, and that they are obliged to bring whatever book contains the assignment to each class. The collaborative learning classroom, like any other, demands such steady reinforcement of its procedures so that, at least for your class, students internalize them. This simple device of making lists can serve higher level thinking skills. Here is an exercise for late in the semester that repeats my simple prescription for reading, but presses students to connect the civil rights movement to earlier readings on Afro-American leadership and make some larger generalizations. The students are reading an essay on the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and some documents from the era of the civil rights movement: THE WAY WE LIVED, CHAPTER 14 Historians require evidence for the general statements they make. Indeed in any argument, we ask for particulars as evidence for more general assertions. Below are eleven statements about the readings...that can be supported by more specific points in the readings. As you read, list briefly the evidence for each of the statements. List as well any evidence against the statements.After a series of conventional statements for which readers easily find evidence ("Good leadership and organization were crucial to the success of the boycott.") comes a series of three generalizations of a different character:
Students readily find evidence for all these statements, each touching on different parts of the Montgomery story: the boycott, the cultural and economic institutions of the Black community that enabled the boycott to continue (which otherwise students take for granted or simply don't notice), and the court case that desegregated the busses (which students otherwise tend to forget because it doesn't fit with the mystique of direct action). They do a good job of finding the evidence, I think, because they do not have to deal with all these different kinds of evidence at once and therefore don't have to decide which of the three strategies is responsible for success in Montgomery. Often in class discussion--usually based on having groups place the lists of particulars for these questions on the board--all the explanations come together. When this happens, I short circuit the evaluation process by announcing that the class did so well that I am giving everyone and every group a five for the day, an event that I try to make happen at least once per term, and sometimes a little more frequently in particularly successful classes. (The idea comes from student complaints at the tail end of a very good session a few years ago that taking a quiz was silly after such a terrific debate in class and why didn't I just give everyone an A for the day--which I did.) Otherwise, I have the class do a ten minute essay explaining why the Montgomery bus boycott succeeded. Other such exercises lead students to make evaluative judgments. In the exercise below students and groups are required to develop separate lists of arguments pro and con. Overlap with other groups is built into the exercise in order to generate debate. The basic format, however, remains an exercise in reading. THE WAY WE LIVED, CHAPTER 12 THE INTERNMENT OF JAPANESE-AMERICANS In this exercise, we will be looking at how historians examine an emotionally charged issue. We will look first at specific evidence about the facts of the matter. Then we will see what kind of moral judgments we wish to draw about the interment of Japanese-Americans and the general American view of World War II as a "good war." Using WWL Ch. 12 and FA Ch. 25 [textbook chapter of World War II], make two lists, one of specific evidence for and one of specific evidence against the general assertion assigned to your group: 1) Officials believed that removing Japanese-Americans from the West Coast was a military necessity. When I first began using this exercise, it asked for only one side of the argument from each group. This however let to occasional outright refusals to do the exercise at all: "I can't develop evidence that the relocation camps weren't concentration camps when I think they were." Many students find it difficult even to collect evidence from the readings on both sides of an issue that stirs strong feelings. In doing this exercise, students tend to load the evidence in favor of the outcome they prefer, but with some pushing they find the counter evidence in the readings as well. I then try to help them turn their strong visceral feelings into arguments about why one body of evidence is more powerful and persuasive than another. Instead of leading them from a reading exercise to one about historical judgment, I am pushing in the opposite direction, pressing them to use their moral judgment to sharpen their reading skills, to see how they can acknowledge counter evidence without upsetting their arguments. The assignment never feels like more than a partial success, but I always return to some version of it, if only to suggest that people can consider reading someone else's holy script without fear of losing their own moorings. I generally ask students to write a ten minute essay arguing for whatever thesis they like, but insist that they present at least one piece of counter evidence and I remind them that their grade will depend not on the opinion they support, but on their success in offering evidence and responding to evidence contrary to their position. Not all students will require as much work on their reading as many whom I teach and not all instructors will want to invest so much effort in improving this skill. Collaborative learning, as some of these exercises illustrate, enables me to improve students' reading while moving them into the wider range of skills we try to teach in survey courses. And these are the skills I prefer to develop and assess. As a historian I lack the technical expertise to assess reading. I informally track grades in the little class evaluations--which rise in the course of the term, and I ruthlessly shorten the time allowed to complete exercises. Both indicate clear if not exactly linear progress through the term. My ultimate interest, however, is in historical learning, writing, and critical thinking skills, not the reading that is their base. These I assess largely by a set of combined group and individual projects which produce connected individual papers and group projects which I videotape, one at the midterm and one at the end of the term. One reason for the gradual speedup in daily exercises is to create class time for groups to work on their group projects. The presentations are big events: students each write a paper that serves as a research note for the group presentation; groups compose questions on their topic which are then for the final examination; and they create scripts and sometimes even props and costumes. I omit further details about these presentations because they go so far beyond my subject here of teaching students to read. But they constitute vital pieces of assessment data, essentially a historian's assessment of how well students have learned the skills they need: papers that go into departmental assessment portfolios when requested and videotapes that indicate how well groups tackle historical problems and present interpretations that relate usefully to final examination questions. Whatever the results--and of course they vary widely--I can argue that they show what students were able to do individually and collectively with material they learned by reading and then discussing with each other. Whether that is a sufficient assessment for the purposes of administrators, boards, trustees and state legislators, I don't know. It is certainly convincing evidence to me that my students are learning some history, and that I am teaching history, not just how to read. Just as students remain in my mind members of "Nonreaders Anonymous," so do faculty who use collaborative learning keep their membership in a group I envision as "Lecturers Anonymous." "The hardest part for me as a teacher was to keep my mouth shut," writes Walter L. Bateman in his excellent book on inquiry learning, Open to Question: The Art of Teaching and Learning by Inquiry (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990, p. 33). Like most people using collaborative learning, I struggle to overcome the life-long assumption that I am being paid for what I say in class. I envision a bare room in the basement of a church or firehouse, tweed jacketed men and women chain chugging instant coffee and complaining about the odor of smoke from the last twelve step group to occupy the room. "My name is Bob M.: I'm a lecturer. Used to do it two-three times a day. Couldn't stop myself...." Using any form of collaborative learning does demand great adjustments in a teacher's expectations. First of all is the use of time. Lecturing is far more efficient at covering course content. Teaching skills means limiting coverage. Perhaps some instructors can avoid this dilemma, but I doubt it. In any class, we always have to decide what is most important and drop less important material. Collaborative learning exercises focused on teaching reading push yet farther in this direction. The consolation is that while students learn less material by reading and talking and writing about what is read, they retain more than they do from lectures. But the first time I skipped the War of 1812 in an American History survey, I spent weeks guiltily slinking down the History Department hallways. A second problem is to accept the tertiary role your presence in the class plays behind the books you have assigned and the exercises and instructions you have created before hand. In short, almost all of your work is done before you enter the class. Perhaps, you'll say, that's nothing new. But this is. You can't correct your mistakes by what you do in class. On the contrary, you can mess up in innumerable ways and the more you do the bigger the mess. When you talk, students listen--always. While they are listening to you talk, the skills-based curriculum you have created for them goes out the window. It takes a long time before you begin to enjoy seeing a class full of students busily talking to each other while you have nothing specific to do. The first time you get worried that the classroom feels too organized and too quiet you are on your way to that new place to which collaborative learning and offering students the chance to learn the skills they need leads. But expect the road to be hell. An instructor always has great power in a classroom, but collaborative learning tests one's sense of control. Groups work differently from each other: one is discussing World War II while a second is on last night's television programs. Group two may simply have been better prepared and more efficient in completing their work. Or they could be screwing up. Either way, you have to leave them alone and expect your grading system to discipline them. Unserious students don't fade into the back wall of the class. Serious students deal with them in their group at every class, and you hear about it. All the dirty secrets of the classroom once yours alone now require explanation. You have to accept--or better yet enjoy--noisy classrooms, lip from students, lessons whose length you can't easily control, and few chances to show off your learning. I hope this essay has offered a few reasons why you might make that choice. ADDED MATERIAL |
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