nf1336: er our topic this morning is er collaborative learning now the reason 
that we have this session is actually because a few years ago i think it was 
four years ago students on the M-A course actually suggested that we do this 
session at the beginning of the year er we were talking about collaborative 
work and i was using it a lot in my classes and i was doing some research some 
study of collaborative work and i gave a talk at the end of the year to which M-
A students were invited and they said at the end of that talk we think you 
should do a talk like that at the beginning of the year so that people become 
aware of the issues in collaborative work because a lot of the tutors use it in 
their classes and you may well have experienced it already perhaps tutors have 
asked you to sit together in a small group or to prepare something together out 
of class in a group er so that's really my role this afternoon i'm acting as a 
kind of intermediary 
between previous students and yourselves to pass on some of their thoughts 
about collaborative work okay i think it would probably be a good idea just to 
explain what i mean by collaborative work because it can take many shapes and 
forms it can be fairly straightforward and simple er in other words a short er 
group discussion task er during class time just to give you a quick example and 
i'm taking the examples from my own classes one that i've often used with 
teachers er which i used many years ago when i was working with namex which is 
why his name is there er it was at the beginning of a psychology course and we 
asked teachers to think about the sorts of opinions or assumptions that they 
had about learning and we gave them some to think about okay er these are 
statements about language learning in the English language classroom and we 
wanted the teachers first to look at it together and then to compare their 
opinions with those of colleagues in a small group now that task usually took 
er fifteen to twenty minutes and then there was a plenary afterwards and 
students tended to be grouped as they were sitting in the classroom and that's 
probably happened to you already just turn to the few people around you and 
talk about the particular topic and exchange opinions so that's a fairly short 
simple example of collaborative work but then i think you'll find during the 
year that there will be more complex and longer tasks which you're asked to do 
this is another one er and this takes about an hour in the classroom and it's 
from the topic of extensive reading the idea of setting up a class library of 
reading material for learners er and you can see that it it's a task that will 
take quite some time because the teachers are going to select a set of readers 
that they think would be useful for their classes so we take 
into the classroom a huge pile of graded readers ask students to work in groups 
of four or five and together sort through and decide what they would choose and 
as they do that think what criteria they are using to make those decisions so 
at the end of the task they will have a set of criteria for selecting reading 
material for learners and then we ask them to prioritize the criteria er i 
think you can appreciate that in asking a group of teachers to do that it gives 
plenty of time for them to reflect to make sense of this to use their 
experience to use their own opinions and perceptions and it's likely to be far 
more effective than somebody just standing up and saying this is a useful list 
of criteria for selecting reading material in the classroom er it's what some 
people call deep learning because you become involved in the topic in the task 
er and you learn by applying your own knowledge your own experience as it were 
so those are just two 
examples but there is also more complex still er types of collaborative 
learning sometimes you may be asked to work with a group of two or three other 
students to prepare a presentation of an article on a particular topic that the 
class is looking at and you will need to work together outside the classroom to 
decide how you're going to organize the presentation who's going to talk about 
what and and you will need to build a relationship a rapport with your 
colleagues in order to do that successfully and later on in the year in the 
professional practice courses certainly in mine and i think in namex's i don't 
know namex's so well but you will be asked to form er what we call a design 
syndicate because part of the purpose of the professional practice courses is 
that you design materials and you learn through the process of designing them 
and quite a lot of that design will go on outside the classroom and you will be 
given the opportunity to work with 
who you wish to work with but with the tutor's help if you need help but by 
that time you probably have got to know people and will know who you might work 
successfully with and again in groups of four or five you will be asked to 
design a particular kind of material and then come back to the next week's 
class and present it to your colleagues who will evaluate it critically er and 
give comments and opinions and so on as feedback to your work er and as i said 
a lot of that work will go on outside the classroom so it will be your 
responsibility to get together to organize yourselves and and to work 
successfully together now there are obviously great advantages i say obviously 
i hope it's obvious to you as teachers that there are great advantages in 
working collaboratively er i have to say that this summer er i have been doing 
a small-scale research study with last year's M-A students before 
they went home and it involved interviewing er teachers who were on the course 
last year the topic of the study was actually about the ways in which they felt 
the course had helped them to develop as teachers as creative as autonomous as 
resourceful teachers er and i interviewed about twenty-two of the teachers from 
last year and i was very pleased to hear that they all but one er felt that 
they had developed con-, substantially er in terms of their their teaching 
their creativity and so on and when i asked them what in particular had helped 
them to develop i was i was quite surprised actually but without excepti-, well 
w-, with the exception of one er they all said that the main prompt towards 
their development was working with other teachers in the group in the different 
kinds of collaborative work that they had been doing during the year that they 
had learned a very great deal not just from the reading not just from the 
tutors the input but from working with 
other people sharing ideas and learning that people all round the world have 
the same kinds of problems and issues in the English language classroom and 
have found lots of ideas for resolving them so it was sharing of that kind that 
they felt particularly useful er here are some quotations from teachers i found 
that this collaborative work really helped me in finding solutions to problems 
which i couldn't find entirely from my own experience or from the theory i had 
learned okay here's another one er and this was er a teacher who was also a 
teacher trainer okay so she said i think in a teachers' workshop such a method 
is indispensable and i would surely apply it to get teachers feeling they are 
part of the learning to draw from their experience and knowledge here's another 
one working in a group sharing my opinion with others was instructive i learned 
a lot 
from my colleagues er this was an interesting one i should try to work with 
someone i don't like [laughter] this is important to me as a teacher trainer 
who has to work together sometimes with someone i don't like [laughter] i think 
that was a very sensible approach to take and this one i found very interesting 
he was a university lecturer from India and he was somebody who was a bit 
irritated by group work but nevertheless felt that it was important look what 
he says group work i sometimes felt to be irritating and so polarized so much 
time is spent before intersubjectivity is achieved and discussion seems to 
progress so often i've been tempted to chip in and to direct the discussions 
the way i think is right but group work is a cooperative process that 
necessarily involves a warming-up period and interpersonal skills i shan't push 
the river that's a very nice metaphor 
i shan't push the river it makes me realize what i ask of my students in 
discussion because it is standard practice now in many parts of the world to 
get students in the language learning classroom to work together so when you 
experience it as a teacher it can be quite a salutary er er experience so there 
are very positive things that teachers report on but of course group work has 
implicit in it quite a lot of potential problems and issues er namex that er 
teacher said it can be very irritating and sometimes he wanted to direct it er 
in his own way er i remember reading an article in the Higher Education Journal 
a British journal er and it was about collaborative learning on undergraduate 
courses er where students had to work in a team for six months and produce 
materials and give presentations and some of the students were interviewed 
about what they had learned from that 
experience and i always remember one of them said i learned how not to do 
murder just [laughter] er and that that was really her main reaction it had 
been so difficult and so painful at times she wanted to murder [laughter] her 
colleagues er and i remember a course i ran some years ago it was a diploma 
course a practical diploma course where teachers were practising teaching 
together and i had a party at home and invited everybody home and i said to one 
of them Caroline i said i'm very impressed about the way the group has got 
together this year everybody seems to be getting on it's gelled very well and 
there's been none of the usual screaming and shouting that you get before that 
happens and she said oh namex there was plenty of screaming and shouting going 
on but it was in our heads [laughter] right so what students from previous 
years really want me to pass on to you are some of the issues that arise in 
group work things to think about when you find yourself working in a group with 
other people on the course i'm going to give you an example er of one oh i in f-
, fact it's in your handout on pages two and three you'll find an example of 
some group work going on and this was on this M-A course er a couple of years 
back if you have a look at page two er oh sorry i haven't [laughter] given them 
out okay if you have a look at pages two and three you'll find that one 
nf1336: now as i said this is a transcript from a group discussion a few years 
ago and it's right at the beginning of the professional practice course and the 
task that students have been given is a design task so they're working in what 
we call design syndicates er and as you can see in this group there were five 
people and it was a multicultural group namex namex namex namex and namex from 
different countries er all European countries in this in this group in fact and 
what they were doing was designing er a presessional course we chose a 
presessional course because some of them had experience of that er and could 
inform the group but we wanted a course that everybody could think about not a 
course that would be specific to any particular country and this is how they 
started off on the discussion because they were looking at the scores the IELT 
scores that the group of students had it was a simulation so they had 
information about a group of students their IELT scores their needs for the 
future and so on and they just started off trying to talk about the information 
that they had now if you take time to read this at length you will find that 
it's rather a nervous discussion because the group was in the very early stages 
of forming what we know from a lot of research into groups and group 
development is that they usually go through four stages and this is something 
worth thinking about what we have here is an 
example of stage one which is usually called forming that's a nice set of words 
here because they're four verbs er which rhyme forming storming norming and 
performing and at the forming stage you can imagine it i think people are sort 
of eyeing each other up wondering what they're like wondering who's going to 
become dominant who's going to want to lead the group er who's going to be 
silent why are they silent er how they're going to manage to get on with people 
who's going to do the work who might not do the work and so on so it's a kind 
of edgy nervous getting to know people as the group forms and you need a bit of 
time to get through that stage and then we have storming you can imagine from 
the word what that involves very often you then get a difficult stage where 
people start clashing personalities clash or aims clash or people clash because 
they they each want to control the group you've got two strong personalities 
who want to be the chair and direct 
everything so you get that stage of storming and then gradually the group will 
work out its routines its procedures if they're going to rotate the chair how 
are they going to function together and will reach the stage of norming they've 
sorted it out and after they have normed they will be able to perform 
effectively now bear that in mind if you're in a design syndicate next term you 
need probably to go through those stages you need to be aware that that that's 
normal and and you don't need to get worried about the storming phase because 
normally it will sort itself out and things will fall into place and routines 
will form now i've given you that er transcript in your handout but let me show 
you what i discovered because i think it illustrates this and it shows some of 
the issues because while the groups were working i asked them to write diaries 
about what was going on some of them wrote things down as they were actually 
working in the group every 
so often they stopped and wrote something in their diary and some of them wrote 
diaries afterwards immediately afterwards so i was able to take things from the 
diaries and relate them to what was going on in the group and it was really 
very very interesting let me show you some of the things so here we have the 
transcript and this is what they wrote in their diaries here's one i don't like 
to work in a group with her she's too straightforward in expressing her ideas 
opinions and rude in rejecting other people's opinions [laughter] right or this 
one i cannot progress at my own pace but at the pace of the group one member 
had to beg for explanations as she could not follow right perhaps some of you 
will recognize these feelings from when you've been working in groups pity 
we're all saying the same thing and don't realize it [laughter] i tried to butt 
in several times and repeat my 
idea until at last one of my friends says they accept mine [laughter] it annoys 
me when people emphasize words all the time [laughter] there was somebody with 
very very dogmatic er style in that er nothing new was said that i didn't 
already know i've been on enough committees to know what a shambles they can be 
right or this one discussions tended to be dominated by a few individual 
students others could be given a chance to speak some wanted to impress tutors 
they were active participants and others wanted to be on the cassette 
[laughter] this talk struggle was contrary to usual turn-taking right so you 
can see some of the issues coming up here that need to be resolved and a couple 
more i decided to express my disagreement i noticed a certain rejection to what 
i was saying i know i was a bit direct but what i said was true and this is the 
person who the other person said was very dominating 
sf1337: mm 
nf1336: 
in the discussion this disorganization makes me feel impatient and aggressive 
especially as there's one person in the group who's very negative [laughter] 
and then this one which is interesting because the group was mixed and had 
different educational and cultural backgrounds i found it difficult at times to 
discuss openly 'cause i didn't really know what the reactions would be and i 
think we have to bear in mind here in CELTE that we are working in a 
multicultural group and people have very different ways of doing things let me 
give you an anecdote about that some years ago in another university i 
organized an induction from a for an M-A group and i asked the president of the 
Students' Union to come along his name was Winston and Winston came along and 
talked about the Students' Union and then he said any questions and and one of 
the teachers in the group raised a hand and said yes i yes i've i've got a few 
queries er and he asked a question and Winston just opened his mouth to start 
answering and this teacher Matthew said no no wait i've got another question er 
and people looked a bit shocked but Matthew just ploughed on and and asked 
another question and Winston waited till he finished and just started to speak 
and m-, no i haven't finished yet i've got another question [laughter] and he 
actually went through five questions by which time Winston had got his notebook 
out and was [laughter] jotting then down now that was actually very fortunate 
because after it had happened one of the students in the group who was quite 
direct said to Matthew is that the way you do things in your country and he 
looked very surprised and said well well yes what's the problem [laughter] and 
and the other people said well we wouldn't do it like that in my culture you 
know pe-, people might get a bit offended and it's difficult to 
remember all the questions so we were able to move into a useful discussion 
about cultural differences in the group er all sorts of things like what are 
the polite ways in er a British context or in a multicultural setting to er get 
your way into a conversation if there's er a seminar discussion going on and 
you want to say something what are the ways in which it's acceptable to do it 
that won't offend other people do you just butt in and and speak over another 
person or well what are the ways what strategies would you use if somebody's 
talking perhaps you think they've been talking too much and you want to say 
something and there's a group of eight of you sitting around what would you do 
to get into the conversation 
ss: excuse me 
nf1336: excuse me so you would use verbal excuse me and then you'd try to say 
something what 
else could you do 
ss: 
nf1336: namex 
sf1338: i'm putting my raised hand 
nf1336: yeah w-, yes [laughter] 
sf1338: in the air 
nf1336: waving your hand yes so some kind of non-verbal signal waving your hand 
or raising a finger [laughter] or or half-, halfway between verbal and non-
verbal [laughter] right coughing or clearing your ready to speak but there are 
ways that are acceptable and there are ways which are not so acceptable and 
which might cause offence and this is the kind of thing that one needs to be 
aware of and why are people silent in groups what are the reasons for silence 
in groups is it because somebody's bored is it because they haven't understood 
the topic er is it nothing to do with the class whatsoever is it because they 
had a row with their partner before they came to 
class is it because their car broke down on the way to work and they're worried 
about what it's going to cost to fix it right is it because they were cruel to 
their cat and they're feeling guilty [laughter] i mean there could be lots and 
lots of reasons why people are silent in class what is the significance of 
silence and if somebody is silent what can you do as another member of the 
group to perhaps draw them in okay so there are lots of things going on in 
groups some of them we may be aware of some of them we may not be when i 
analysed all the diaries i found that the things teachers were particularly 
concerned about were these i've just built some categories er and these are 
there in in the handout for you interpretation you are given a task by a tutor 
and sometimes people get er different impressions of what they're supposed to 
do and it's always worth spending the first few minutes of the say half-hour 
that you've got to do the task just talking through what it is you're supposed 
to do if 
somebody says okay what are we doing er how are we going to tackle this so that 
you're sharing interpretations of the task er and especially if you're working 
by yourselves out of class it's very useful if somebody takes on that role and 
says okay w-, what are we doing er and how are we going to go about doing it 
which d-, which leads us on to procedures er the need for some organized 
constructive approach er and somebody here comments on it took a long time to 
form the group to clear the backgrounds to find a way of working together so 
it's always a good idea if you've been put together by the tutor just to say 
who you are where you're from er and then to move on to interpreting the task 
and to make decisions about how you're going to proceed i'll give you an 
example later on of what one group decided because they actually put together a 
set of procedures that they wanted to use for group work and they 
published it and circulated it to all of the tutors in the department this is 
how we want to do group work when you ask us to do it okay er participation 
being aware of turn-taking making sure that you're not being too dominant that 
you're giving other people a chance trying to contribute and if people aren't 
contributing trying to draw them in i'll say a bit more about that later 
relationships often get in the way especially in the early stages you want to 
get to know people you're not sure about them perhaps you want to impress them 
and your relationship with other members of the group and this student this 
teacher has said overrode the need for objectivity or efficiency in carrying 
out the task now that's something that may happen in the early stages you're so 
busy getting to know other people and finding a way of working together you're 
not focusing sufficiently on the task but you do need to get through 
that as it were and the other things disputes and perhaps ideally you do need 
er a stage of storming where you can actually say look i don't actually agree 
with the way that we're doing this could we possibly consider another way of 
doing it or i do feel perhaps you're talking a bit too much and other people 
perhaps should have a chance to talk and if it's done politely pleasantly er it 
usually works i i find that teachers are usually very collaborative people er 
it it's part of the the ethos of education i might regret saying that this year 
but [laughter] er i do i do think that that's often the case teachers want to 
be collaborative people and are anxious to get on with others time was 
something that came up again and again and this is worth thinking about er i 
think the collaborative work was much more productive when we started to feel 
the time pressure and you'll see when i show you the procedures that one M-A 
group came up with is 
they decided that whenever they had group work they would appoint a chair who 
would keep the discussion going a secretary who would make notes for the 
feedback and a timekeeper so if the task had like four parts to it it was the 
timekeeper's job to say we've got twenty minutes five minutes on each okay and 
the timekeeper would keep an eye on the watch and k-, and keep the group moving 
so even if you didn't finish one bit of it you could move on and think about 
another part of the task and achievement as well and this is something for the 
tutor too er i have the feeling that the group is limited by its own ideas 
there must be many ideas in other groups that we haven't used now your tutor 
will have some method of feedback either a plenary discussion or you may be 
asked to er er to appoint a spokesperson who will speak for the group or you 
may be asked to write notes on a poster which is then put up on the wall and 
people can wander round and 
see the things that you've written or somebody might be asked to write a short 
report for the next meeting of the class er different ways of plenary work if 
you find that a tutor hasn't done that you may like to organize it for 
yourselves if you want to know what's been happening in other groups suggest it 
don't be afraid to suggest things in class so those are the sorts of issues 
that have come up er over the years as it were and er i just wanted to give you 
a couple of ideas about how you might tackle er these sorts of issues if you 
look at page six in the handout i've given you there what's called a self-
perception inventory of functions in group work the research that has gone on 
er and a lot of it has gone on not in education but in a business context where 
people for example in multinational companies have to meet and discuss things 
and cope with cultural differences er a lot of that research has 
shown that when a group is working together there are two types of function 
within that group that will lead to successful or unsuccessful collaborative 
work er one type of function is called a task function and if you have a look 
at some of those obviously you need people who will give opinions you you need 
people who will elicit opinions from colleagues or peers you need somebody who 
is monitoring the discussion and if something is unclear will say er let's just 
stop a moment can we clarify that what exactly did you mean okay er you need 
people who will elaborate who will build on other people's contributions well 
that's an interesting idea er perhaps we could develop it a bit because it 
seems to me that this might be possible now these are all task functions that 
keep the discussion going and get the job of work done but groups don't 
function very well if you don't also have what we call team functions you need 
somebody as i said earlier who will draw in the 
silent people and actually say what do you think okay it may be that person is 
silent especially in a multicultural group because the discussion is going 
quickly and it takes some people time not just to think what they want to say 
but to think how to say it in English er some people feel more confident in the 
English language and they start to dominate and may think well there are some 
very quiet people in this group i i ought to say something or we're not going 
to get anywhere but in fact perhaps all it needs is to say what what do you 
think have you got an opinion and give somebody time to formulate their 
thoughts in English and and get them out as it were to express them so we need 
encouragers we need people to encourage we need people to respond when they're 
listening to actually say things like that's an interesting idea you know what 
do you think er to get people together working together or if people start 
disagreeing to say you know wait a minute 
we seem to have a disagreement here let's try and sort it out and teams groups 
don't really work unless there are people doing that now a couple of years back 
er i was using research instruments like this all the way through a term and at 
the end of a term er i asked the students to write about their experiences of 
group work and i've given you one example i've called it case study one here 
this was a teacher from Eastern Europe she was a teacher trainer and here she's 
reflecting on the way in which she felt she was able to change her 
contributions to group work as she said to begin with she felt that she was 
very dominant very hyper she always wanted to talk she always wanted to make 
contributions but as the term progressed she tried more and more to take on 
some team functions to draw other people in to be a responsive listener to 
conciliate when there were disagreements and at the end of the course she said 
that was one of the most useful things that 
she had learned because she had developed skills of interacting with other 
people in groups which she had to do a lot in her work so she felt she had 
developed skills that were transferable to her job when she went home okay so 
think about those functions as they're described and perhaps when you're doing 
group work afterwards just have a look at that list and think which functions 
did i perform er and are there some others that i could do in the group okay er 
and the other thing that you might like to think about is how you actually set 
up your group work this is the thing i talked about earlier er that the M-A 
course participants published to tutors er and they said okay tutors should 
have primary responsibility for designating the members of each group in order 
to ensure variety throughout the year okay tutors should indicate the 
approximate amount of time available for the completion of the task sometimes 
we forget to do that right so it would 
be very good if somebody in the group in your group actually said er how long 
have we got for this very nicely if the tutor forgets to tell you 'cause then 
you can organize yourselves you know how much time you've got that each group 
should appoint its own chair secretary spokesperson and timekeeper right and 
the roles of the above are as follows the chair is to guide discussion and 
ensure progress the secretary is to take notes for later feedback either in 
clear written form for typing and display or as the basis for oral reporting 
the timekeeper is to remind the group of its deadlines and the fifth point that 
the product of the discussion or task should be either presented in written 
form or reported by the secretary and this was useful with additions from the 
other group members that you never leave it entirely to one person but that you 
make it possible for other people to chip in with something that the 
spokesperson might have forgotten so those are just things to think about when 
you find yourself involved in group work here but there's one other point that 
i would like to make because again this is something that has developed over 
the years students on the M-A course have found it very very useful to set up 
their own learning syndicates now the last page of the handout er gives you 
some information about that they have functioned extremely well and when i was 
doing my interviews this summer this was the kind of group work that people 
found particularly useful what do we mean by a learning syndicate it's a self- 
chosen self-help group you get together with other students the numbers are 
usually four five or six not more than that and it's a group that meets outside 
of classes nothing to do with the organization of tutors as i said self-
selecting er making your own decisions about when to 
meet where to meet and what to do er and really its goal is to cooperate in 
order to support whatever work you're involved in at different times of the 
year er it is independent from tutors but what i found over the years and it's 
very helpful is that if a learning syndicate has come up with some kind of 
problem or issue perhaps to do with a coursework assignment and they want to 
meet with the tutor then they arrange a joint meeting with the tutor so that 
six people will go to see me or namex or namex together to talk about the same 
issue and that is very very economical for you and for us because there are a 
lot of you er and a discussion in a group usually yields more er than just a 
discussion between two people but i've listed here some of the things that 
learning syndicates can do er there are some things that you are very well 
advised to do and some that you really should avoid doing so i've put things 
here like sharing library books and articles 
that's a very useful thing to do er sharing lecture notes or recordings as well 
er and taking turns at producing a set of notes if you've got three classes in 
one day you might have three different people in your syndicate making the 
notes and then sharing them and it's a lot less work for everybody buying 
textbooks together that's a good way of sharing it and establishing a private 
syndicate library okay er reading each others' drafts of coursework assignments 
and commenting on them trying to see any language problems or saying whether 
you feel something is clear or not practising giving seminar presentations 
you're all going to be asked to give presentations at some point in the year 
good idea to practise it and get feedback from colleagues er or just providing 
help on demand somebody rings you up can you help me with this okay or just 
giving moral support if somebody begins to feel stressed or a bit low about 
things giving moral support can be very 
useful what you must avoid is doing your assignments together [laughter] 
because tutors become very aware of that and we don't have a policy in CELTE of 
doing work together because it has to be assessed individually it may be 
possible later in the year if you choose similar topics for dissertations to 
work together on some kind of research instrument er i've just marked two 
dissertations from my own students and they wanted to investigate staff 
appraisal as a topic and we found that there were only about twenty people on 
the M-A course and among staff who had experience of staff appraisal in schools 
and i said it's not a good idea if you both try to give those twenty people a 
questionnaire you're not going to get complete returns so they worked together 
on the questionnaire and designed it and administered it but then i made two 
lots of copies and they analysed it and wrote it up completely separately so 
collaboration may be possible 
to a certain extent but your written work should always be your own and tutors 
will recognize immediately if three people have turned out the same essay so 
it's not a very good thing to do okay er you will find classrooms empty in the 
late afternoon the period between about four and six a lot of the rooms are 
free and you just need to ask in the office er if there's a room that you can 
use for your group okay but do do think about that because we've had such 
positive feedback from members of the course about the usefulness the value of 
these self-help groups during the year may not be something you're familiar 
with but certainly something worth trying okay and that really brings me to the 
end of the messages that i'm passing on from previous students er how are we 
doing it's nearly two o'clock does anybody have a burning question at all 
[laughter] no okay well i hope that's given you some ideas for the year