Student-Student Interaction

Providing learning activities that invite students to engage with each other is a key way to foster active learning.  In addition to student-teacher interaction, and student-content interaction, it is important to build into your classes ample ways for students to interact with each other.  Providing opportunities for students to engage with each other is also an important tenet of culturally responsive teaching.

However, not all collaborative learning is high quality.  Rather than just place students into groups and ‘wait for the magic to happen’, it is important to think about both structural and dynamic quality elements that lead to high quality collaboration.

Structural Quality Elements:

• Student-centered, culturally responsive activities- does the activity reflect students of different cultures?  Does it include culturally affirming and relevant images, authors, and ideas?
• Balanced group composition – are groups made up of a diversity of students from a racial standpoint?  age?  genders?
• Group norms and task clarity – does the activity have a well-defined purpose and a list of steps to follow?

Dynamic Quality Elements:

• Responsive, respectful, and inclusive interactions – is there a process in place for students to address microagressions?
• Constructive exchange
• Shared leadership and decision making

Group work in the classroom

Try making learning social – use social-annotation tools like Perusall or Hypothesis.  You can annotate some important passages yourself.  Letting students do the work can help with the sense of isolation some students may have been feeling.

Small group work has several advantages.  Students:

• connect new learnings to existing knowledge to shape new understanding (Bransford, et al., 1999)
• solidify understanding of course content by hearing from peers, who may have a way of explaining a topic in a way that makes more sense
• have opportunity to hear different perspectives and learn from the diversity in the classroom
• learn job-transferable skills such as collaboration and cooperation

Here is a handout from Harvard Graduate School of Education with protocols for different types of discussion and small group work.

Peer critiques

This practice gives students an opportunity to engage in their learning by evaluating a peer’s work against a standardized rubric, checklist, or a visual example.

Peer critiques:

• Help students develop assessment skills that can reinforce current course content as well as being a valuable life skill
• Aid students in developing constructive feedback skills
• Give students practice working with rubrics.  An important equity element is to ensure students all have an opportunity to practice a bit with the rubric first, perhaps using it to evaluate anonymized works from previous quarters, or to practice using them to critique real world examples.  By having students practice with the rubric first, building common understanding of the language and criteria of the rubric, the instructor helps ensure all the students are starting at the same place
• Allow students to practice synthesizing feedback into future drafts or works
• Help students gain insight into other perspectives

Equity considerations

Providing opportunities for students to engage with each other is also an important aspect of culturally responsive teaching.  Hausmann et al. (2007) found that the more peer support black students had over time, the higher their sense of belonging, suggesting it is important for faculty to provide opportunities for them to engage with their peers.   Research also points to evidence that collaboration is linked to higher grades for black students, even when prior grades are accounted for, a result not found for white students.  These findings suggest that for Black students, having the chance to engage in high-quality collaborative activities may help boost
academic success.

Highline faculty tips

By Ruth Frickle – Spring 2016

I have, depending on the course, always used group work in my classes to some extent.  In the human relations class (PSYCH120), group work predominated (yes, right, you must relate to humans in the human relations class), while in general psychology (PSYC&100) and other courses I tended to use group work as ancillary to lecture.

What I am now doing in general psychology is actually a very specific approach with strong research underpinnings, which is called ‘inter-teaching’.  There are a lot of similar models out there, including the moderate/high structure model that is used by Sarah Eddy and her colleagues.  The inter-teaching model has been developed and used in psychology classes for several years, and assessed for effectiveness.  The strength of the model enticed Sue Frantz to give it a whirl, and she in her quiet but infectious way got me thinking about it.  So, between the power of Sarah Eddy’s research, which shows the positive impact on students of color that this approach can have, and the proximity of Sue’s work with it, I have implemented a version of it over the past year.  It is a work in progress, but I’m excited about it.

The model is this: students have a set of guided reading questions to answer before they come to class.  In class, they discuss their answers, try to clarify concepts for one another, and identify what concepts are troublesome enough that they would like me to lecture on them.  Students get points for doing the reading questions, but their answers are assessed for depth rather than accuracy.  The idea is to for them to wrestle with the content by reading the text in a focused way before I talk about it.  They’re bound to grasp some stuff but not other stuff, and that’s good for learning.

The discussions give them a chance to explain concepts to one another, and challenge each other for clarity.  Discursive practice has value that we as teachers understand well, as most of us report we understand our content better after we’ve taught it.  They also earn points for participating in discussion.  I briefly lecture on the concepts they are most challenged by as a supplement to the work they’re already doing and hopefully ensure depth of understanding.

I’ve been very happy with the level of engagement that I see from students.  They do the work and submit it on time, they are active in discussion, they attend, and they stick with it pretty enthusiastically.  The level of mastery (as reflected in their means on exams) is somewhat better than with my previous approach, but I can see that they could get even more from the process and perhaps do better.  I think that greater improvements in mastery can come if I work with them on building some skills that most of them don’t currently seem to have.

One of the things that I would like to help them with is better discussions.  Their approach to discussing the reading and the questions tends to be each reading their answers to the questions to each other.  Many (most?) don’t seem to know how to think about someone else’s answers, to explore examples, or to reflect on their own understanding.  I’ve begun to dig around for ways that I might begin to help them develop these skills and found some possibilities, but I want to ask you for your help.  Have you encountered this issue?  What do you do to remediate?  What possible interventions have you heard of or think of as promising (but perhaps have not used)?

Professional development opportunities

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Related books in the LTC collection

• Barkley, Elizabeth F., et al. Collaborative Learning Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty. Second edition., Jossey-Bass & Pfeiffer Imprints, Wiley, 2014.
• Nilson, Linda Burzotta. Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors. Fourth edition., Jossey-Bass, 2016. (see Chapter 16)
• Davis, Barbara Gross. Tools for Teaching. 2nd ed., Jossey-Bass, 2009. (see Chapters 21-23)

Additional resources and scholarship

• A user’s manual for student led discussions (Gale Rhodes and Robert Schaible – Harvard)
• Group Work   (Faculty Focus)
• Peer Assessment (Cornell University)
• Group Work-Design Guideline (UC-Berkeley)
• Facilitating Group Work (Washington Univ – St. Louis)
• Facilitating In-Class Group Work (Washington Univ. – St. Louis)
• Using Group Projects Effectively (Carnegie Mellon Univ.)
• Group work: Using cooperative learning groups effectively (Vanderbilt Univ.)
• Group Work in the Classroom (Grand Canyon Univ.

 

References

Bransford, J.D., Brown, A.L., and Cocking, R.R. (Eds.) (1999). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press

Hausmann, L. R. M., Schofield, J. W., & Woods, R. L. (2007). Sense of belonging as a predictor of intentions to persist among African American and White first-year college students. Research in Higher Education, 48(7), 803–839