Narrative on Designing Professional Learning on Groupwork & Equity
Taking Action for Equitable Inputs
To tackle the question of how could we increase equity, I collaborated with Kyle Linnik, a member of the Teacher Leadership cohort and a 7th grade math/science teacher at HTMCV. Thinking about the question of how we could all grow to make our classrooms more equitable, Kyle and I decided to continue HTMCV’s focus on equity and groupwork. Kyle and I were particularly interested in groupwork because of its connection to equity, especially groupwork’s potential in terms of personalization. We based much of our work on Elizabeth Cohen and Rachel Lotan’s Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom. Cohen and Lotan propose that groupwork, done effectively, has the ability to increase access and challenge for all students in the classroom. In their chapter on the purpose of groupwork, Cohen and Lotan (2014) contend:
Groupwork provides greater access to the learning tasks to more students in the classroom with a wide range of academic skills and linguistic proficiency. Productive groupwork increases and deepens opportunities to learn content and develop language and thus has the potential to build equitable classrooms (6).
In addition to groupwork providing more personalized access and challenge for all leaders, effective groupwork also has the potential to help students develop relationships that increase equity. When students have the opportunity to work together in a healthy team, they are able to break down barriers that might cause disequitable treatment. Cohen and Lotan (2014) cite research that “cooperative groups and teams are particularly beneficial in developing harmonious interracial relations in desegregated classrooms” (19). Ladson-Billings (1995)made a similar claim stating that a key element of a classroom that promotes the achievement of all learners is a teacher who develops a community of learners and encourages students to learn collaboratively (480). Similarly Noguera (2003) describes in his article “Joaquin’s Dilemma” several steps educators can take to work with students who might be held back by a stereotype threat. This list includes ensuring that students are not continuously self-segregating (32), a goal that can accomplished through effective groupwork. Based on this research, we hoped that by focusing on supporting staff in planning and implementing more effective groupwork, we could promote inputs that would lead to equitable outputs.
In addition, we were very interested in how students experience the concept of equity during groupwork. Cohen and Lotan (2014) describe different status issues that can arise in groupwork situations. Status issues result from students having academic or social status which gives them more influence or power in a group than other students. We were curious how students had experienced this phenomenon, how it affected them, and what ideas they had to mitigate it.
Given this context, Kyle and I through a series of conversations narrowed down our essential questions to:
● How do students perceive equity in groupwork?
● What can we learn from each other, from text, from students about making groupwork equitable?
Since HTMCV already had a professional learning cycle focus on equity, we decided the best way to explore these questions with our community was during one of these PD sessions. We worked together to design an agenda for the session that we ultimately facilitated on Wednesday October 1st. The agenda for the session is below:
Essential Questions:
● How do students perceive equity in groupwork?
● What can we learn from each other, from text, from students about making groupwork equitable?
Agenda:
● Panel of students discussing equity in groupwork (address the essential questions)
● Video of groupwork interactions and as whole group identify issues of equity (scaffolding towards identifying and discussing strategies increasing equity)
● Discussing equity dilemmas (6 groups, 3 dilemmas), identify issues of equity, and then strategize how apply ideas from Ch. 4-6 in Designing Groupwork to increase equity
● Discussing one action step to take between now and next PD (maybe invite others to observe when you try it out?)
We began the session by inviting students from each grade level to share with teachers in small groups their thoughts about equity and groupwork. Kyle and I worked with the students prior to the PD to help them prepare their thinking about these ideas. During the session teachers rotated to different students and asked questions either from the list we prepared or ones that were most relevant to their practice. After those conversations, we debriefed what we learned from interacting with students. Teachers noted many new insights including:
Teach group work skill so that students can gain the trust that they have with friends as an academic trust with other classmates
Students said the most effective group size was 4 - any bigger and it’s difficult for everyone to participate
It’s important that we provide students with tasks that allow to them to do interdependent work and avoid the sitting together, but not really working together phenomenon where they work on parallel tasks. We should explicitly state that talking is important (in fact some students might not feel talking about the task is productive - they think being productive is doing the task).
Teachers also had a several wonderings including:
What does productive group work look like? What does unproductive group work look like? (Could we create videos of these to share with students?)
Could we have a more universal language regarding group work? What the expectations and/or norms are?
We followed the conversations with students with an activity designed to draw out ideas from teachers’ own experiences as well as several chapters of Designing Groupwork that teachers had read in preparation for the professional development. In small groups, participants reviewed one of three dilemmas that Kyle and I had created to represent common challenges in groupwork. We then used a protocol to make personal and text connections to the dilemma. Finally groups worked collaboratively to create a suggested action plan for the dilemma. Afterwards we briefly shared out to the full group. One of the most powerful insights that came out of that conversation was the idea of contrasting productivity with collaboration. We wondered together if students thought being productive - i.e. working in parallel with focus - was more valuable than collaborating with one another. We also focused on the importance of explicitly teaching the skills necessary for effective group work as well as thoughtfully designing tasks that require interdependence.
Finally after thinking about equity and groupwork from the student perspective and sharing ideas for making groupwork effective from both the text and experience, we synthesized that learning to create action steps. Each teacher wrote a letter to him or herself with an idea for one strategy to try out in his or her class to promote equitable groupwork. In addition, we asked participants in the PD to fill out an exit card with takeaways as well as feedback for us about what was effective in the PD and what could have been improved.
References
Cohen, E., & Lotan, R. (2014). Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous
Classroom (3rd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press.
Delpit, L. (1995, excerpt). Other people’s children. New York: The New Press.
Fuller, H. (2010). Education, choice and change. UnBoxed, 6, Fall 2010.
Kohn, A. (2011). Poor teaching for poor children…in the name of reform. Education Week,
April 27, 2011.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of cultural relevancy. American Educational
Research Journal, 32, 3 (Autumn 1995), 465-491.
McLeod, S. (1995). Pygmalion or Golem? Teacher Affect and Efficacy. College Composition
and Communication, 46 (3), 369-386.
McLaren, P. (2009). Critical pedagogy: A look at the major concepts. Chap. 3 in The Critical
Pedagogy Reader. New York: Routledge. Second Edition.
Noguera, P. (2003). Joaquin’s dilemma. In Sadowski, M., ed. Adolescents at school:
perspectives on youth, identity, and education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education
Press.
Taking Action for Equitable Inputs
To tackle the question of how could we increase equity, I collaborated with Kyle Linnik, a member of the Teacher Leadership cohort and a 7th grade math/science teacher at HTMCV. Thinking about the question of how we could all grow to make our classrooms more equitable, Kyle and I decided to continue HTMCV’s focus on equity and groupwork. Kyle and I were particularly interested in groupwork because of its connection to equity, especially groupwork’s potential in terms of personalization. We based much of our work on Elizabeth Cohen and Rachel Lotan’s Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom. Cohen and Lotan propose that groupwork, done effectively, has the ability to increase access and challenge for all students in the classroom. In their chapter on the purpose of groupwork, Cohen and Lotan (2014) contend:
Groupwork provides greater access to the learning tasks to more students in the classroom with a wide range of academic skills and linguistic proficiency. Productive groupwork increases and deepens opportunities to learn content and develop language and thus has the potential to build equitable classrooms (6).
In addition to groupwork providing more personalized access and challenge for all leaders, effective groupwork also has the potential to help students develop relationships that increase equity. When students have the opportunity to work together in a healthy team, they are able to break down barriers that might cause disequitable treatment. Cohen and Lotan (2014) cite research that “cooperative groups and teams are particularly beneficial in developing harmonious interracial relations in desegregated classrooms” (19). Ladson-Billings (1995)made a similar claim stating that a key element of a classroom that promotes the achievement of all learners is a teacher who develops a community of learners and encourages students to learn collaboratively (480). Similarly Noguera (2003) describes in his article “Joaquin’s Dilemma” several steps educators can take to work with students who might be held back by a stereotype threat. This list includes ensuring that students are not continuously self-segregating (32), a goal that can accomplished through effective groupwork. Based on this research, we hoped that by focusing on supporting staff in planning and implementing more effective groupwork, we could promote inputs that would lead to equitable outputs.
In addition, we were very interested in how students experience the concept of equity during groupwork. Cohen and Lotan (2014) describe different status issues that can arise in groupwork situations. Status issues result from students having academic or social status which gives them more influence or power in a group than other students. We were curious how students had experienced this phenomenon, how it affected them, and what ideas they had to mitigate it.
Given this context, Kyle and I through a series of conversations narrowed down our essential questions to:
● How do students perceive equity in groupwork?
● What can we learn from each other, from text, from students about making groupwork equitable?
Since HTMCV already had a professional learning cycle focus on equity, we decided the best way to explore these questions with our community was during one of these PD sessions. We worked together to design an agenda for the session that we ultimately facilitated on Wednesday October 1st. The agenda for the session is below:
Essential Questions:
● How do students perceive equity in groupwork?
● What can we learn from each other, from text, from students about making groupwork equitable?
Agenda:
● Panel of students discussing equity in groupwork (address the essential questions)
● Video of groupwork interactions and as whole group identify issues of equity (scaffolding towards identifying and discussing strategies increasing equity)
● Discussing equity dilemmas (6 groups, 3 dilemmas), identify issues of equity, and then strategize how apply ideas from Ch. 4-6 in Designing Groupwork to increase equity
● Discussing one action step to take between now and next PD (maybe invite others to observe when you try it out?)
We began the session by inviting students from each grade level to share with teachers in small groups their thoughts about equity and groupwork. Kyle and I worked with the students prior to the PD to help them prepare their thinking about these ideas. During the session teachers rotated to different students and asked questions either from the list we prepared or ones that were most relevant to their practice. After those conversations, we debriefed what we learned from interacting with students. Teachers noted many new insights including:
Teach group work skill so that students can gain the trust that they have with friends as an academic trust with other classmates
Students said the most effective group size was 4 - any bigger and it’s difficult for everyone to participate
It’s important that we provide students with tasks that allow to them to do interdependent work and avoid the sitting together, but not really working together phenomenon where they work on parallel tasks. We should explicitly state that talking is important (in fact some students might not feel talking about the task is productive - they think being productive is doing the task).
Teachers also had a several wonderings including:
What does productive group work look like? What does unproductive group work look like? (Could we create videos of these to share with students?)
Could we have a more universal language regarding group work? What the expectations and/or norms are?
We followed the conversations with students with an activity designed to draw out ideas from teachers’ own experiences as well as several chapters of Designing Groupwork that teachers had read in preparation for the professional development. In small groups, participants reviewed one of three dilemmas that Kyle and I had created to represent common challenges in groupwork. We then used a protocol to make personal and text connections to the dilemma. Finally groups worked collaboratively to create a suggested action plan for the dilemma. Afterwards we briefly shared out to the full group. One of the most powerful insights that came out of that conversation was the idea of contrasting productivity with collaboration. We wondered together if students thought being productive - i.e. working in parallel with focus - was more valuable than collaborating with one another. We also focused on the importance of explicitly teaching the skills necessary for effective group work as well as thoughtfully designing tasks that require interdependence.
Finally after thinking about equity and groupwork from the student perspective and sharing ideas for making groupwork effective from both the text and experience, we synthesized that learning to create action steps. Each teacher wrote a letter to him or herself with an idea for one strategy to try out in his or her class to promote equitable groupwork. In addition, we asked participants in the PD to fill out an exit card with takeaways as well as feedback for us about what was effective in the PD and what could have been improved.
References
Cohen, E., & Lotan, R. (2014). Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous
Classroom (3rd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press.
Delpit, L. (1995, excerpt). Other people’s children. New York: The New Press.
Fuller, H. (2010). Education, choice and change. UnBoxed, 6, Fall 2010.
Kohn, A. (2011). Poor teaching for poor children…in the name of reform. Education Week,
April 27, 2011.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of cultural relevancy. American Educational
Research Journal, 32, 3 (Autumn 1995), 465-491.
McLeod, S. (1995). Pygmalion or Golem? Teacher Affect and Efficacy. College Composition
and Communication, 46 (3), 369-386.
McLaren, P. (2009). Critical pedagogy: A look at the major concepts. Chap. 3 in The Critical
Pedagogy Reader. New York: Routledge. Second Edition.
Noguera, P. (2003). Joaquin’s dilemma. In Sadowski, M., ed. Adolescents at school:
perspectives on youth, identity, and education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education
Press.