Making Rounds: the routine work of the teacher during collaborative learning

 
This page provides a detailed analysis of the work of the teacher during collaborative learning activities. Whilst the importance of the teacher for the success of collaborative learning has frequently been recognized, there is nevertheless a curious absence of detailed studies that describe how the teacher intervenes in pupils’ collaborative learning activities, which may be a reflection of the ambivalent status of teachers within a field that has tried to transfer authority from teachers to pupils. Through a close analysis of different types of teacher interventions into pupils working in pairs with a storyboarding tool, this page argues,

1. Firstly, the concerns of classroom management and pedagogy are typically intertwined.

2. Secondly, although there may be tensions between the perspectives of teachers and pupils these do not take the form of antagonistic struggles.

The page concludes that it may be time to renew our interest in the work of teachers in the analysis of collaborative learning activities.

Introduction

This article deals with phenomenon of collaborative learning .

1: Once the teacher has set up a particular task (which is typically done by talking to the whole class) and pupils have started to work on this task alone or in pairs, the teacher does not sit back and relax at her or his desk, but rather ‘makes rounds’  through the classroom to monitor, evaluate, and control what pupils are doing. Consider this phrase of a writer named Sorensen who says,

The teacher […] is rarely seated. He wanders around among children. He looks restless. His head and upper body move in staccato rhythms. He looks

around uneasily. He bends down over a child, looks at his screen, and talks to him. After a while he gets up and goes to another child, just because she was

in his way, or so it appears. He squats down and talks to her. He gets up and looks around. He walks to another computer, stands behind a child, and looks

at the screen for two minutes. He points at something on the screen and talks

to the child. He straightens his back. His eyes quickly scan the room. […]

What interests Sorensen is the restlessness of the teacher in this situation, a restlessness which for her is the result of the changing nature of task: from a situation in which children are working on identical exercise books and going through the exercises in a sequential manner (thus giving the teacher an easy overview of what children have done and what they will do next) to a task which is more open-ended and has a less clear-cut sequential structure (thus making it much harder for 

There is a long-standing debate on the differences and similarities between ‘collaborative’, ‘cooperative’, or ‘collective’ learning. I am using the term ‘collaborative learning not to designate a particular pedagogical approach, but as a way to characterize situations in which the learning is organized through collaborative activities involving pairs or small groups of learners.

In one situation, if the pupils are working on their own rather than in pairs and the teacher see what children have done and anticipate what they will do next.

What interests me is less the restlessness than the organization of the work of teaching. My aim is to describe in greater detail what exactly a teacher does when he or she bends down to a child, looks at the screen, and talks to the child. In other words, I want to examine what, as the most practical matters in the world, teachers are doing during collaborative learning activities (not what they are supposed to do, but what they do do).