IASCE Forum - Cooperative Learning in Australia

At the international IASCE conference in Singapore in June 2004, we had the pleasure of meeting Robyn Gillies, from the University of Brisbane, and Pamela Wells from the Australasian Association for Co-operative Education, and several of their colleagues. They reminded us that since the 1980s, teachers and teacher educators in Australia have been actively pursuing the challenge of studying and disseminating CL.

Some of us have been to Australia and learned first-hand about the country's specific educational issues. In 1997, IASCE co-president Celeste Brody delivered a paper at the Australian College of Education national conference. For many years, Carole Cooper, a former board member of IASCE, was the director of Global Learning Communities, in Tasmania, as a base for consulting and working with teachers.

Here, Robyn Gillies writes about her research with teachers. This is a welcome opportunity to renew our acquaintance with co-operative learning in Australia and an invitation to reinvigorate the dialogue with its educators.  –Yael Sharan, IASCE Forum Coordinator
 

Cooperative Learning: One Australian Perspective

by Robyn Gillies

While reading the articles in the June 2004 IASCE Newsletter on Cooperative Learning (CL) in Hong Kong, I could not help noticing the similarities to many of my experiences in Australia. Like Hong Kong, all education departments in Australia endorse CL as a pedagogical practice that promotes learning. (Australia has a decentralised administrative system with each of the states and territories having their own education department.) This endorsement, however, is often buried deep in some policy documents on strategies to promote effective learning and teaching, or it is included in some general statement on small group learning which usually includes other strategies such as peer tutoring, peer mediation, and small group work. CL is never clearly defined, and it is left to the reader to disentangle it from other strategies that are used in small group learning situations.

Other similarities to Hong Kong that I noticed included the difficulties teachers often express with embedding CL into an already crowded curriculum and the problems of ensuring that pre-service teachers are aware of CL and the benefits that students derive from this approach to learning. These are some of the many issues I’ve encountered in my attempts over the last decade to help teachers implement CL in their classrooms.

Some early cooperative learning pedagogues in Australia

There have been a number of individuals who have actively promoted cooperative learning in Australia over the last 20 years. Some of these early pedagogues included Joan Dalton with her 1985 book on “Adventures in thinking: creative thinking & co-operative talk in small groups.” Jo-Anne Reid, Peter Forrestal, and Jonathan Cook followed in 1989 with “Small group learning in the classroom” - a guide for teachers who wanted to implement small group learning activities in their English curriculum. Susan Hill and Tim Hill published “The collaborative classroom: A guide to cooperative learning” in 1990 for the elementary classroom, and Julie Boyd followed with “Active learning and co-operation: A compendium of generic teaching and learning strategies for K-12” in 2000. In 1991, there was a National Symposium on Co-operation in Learning and Teaching held in Melbourne.

These activities and publications provide some background information on the development of cooperative learning in Australia and also include some excellent strategies for introducing CL into the classroom. Many teachers have used these publications to help guide their own pedagogical practices on implementing CL. However, while these publications are replete with some excellent practical strategies that teachers can use, I found there was a paucity of research in the Australian context on the effects of CL on students’ learning. It was a desire to “test out” some of the benefits that I’d read about that provided the impetus for my own research on CL.

My current research in Australia

 Implementing CL in classrooms is not easy, as we all know, and there are many ways of going about it. I'm particularly interested in the effects of CL on students’ learning and have learned a great deal from the outcomes of a number of studies that I conducted in both primary and secondary classrooms (Gillies, 2003a, 2003b; Gillies & Ashman 1998; 2003). Grants from the Australian Research Council enabled me to conduct some large-scale research, often involving hundreds of children and their teachers from many different schools across the state of Queensland. To date, these are the only large scale studies on CL that have been conducted in Australia, and I believe they provide valuable insights into how this pedagogical practice can be introduced into classrooms to foster students’ interest in and engagement with learning.

This research, though, has not developed in a vacuum. It has been informed by the work of David and Roger Johnson on the conditions needed to establish successful CL and the contributions of Shlomo Sharan and his colleagues on the importance of ensuring that students are exposed to cognitively challenging group tasks. The work of Noreen Webb on small group processes helped me understand the conditions for effective helping, while others who have provided additional insights include Angela O’Donnell, Alison King, Robert Slavin, and Elizabeth Cohen, to name a few.

Conditions for effective CL

There has been a plethora of worldwide studies over the last three decades focussing on CL. Many of them highlight the importance of a number of pre-conditions for successful implementation. From my perspective, reinforced by the results of my research, these conditions include:

-           Ensuring that teachers understand the theoretical perspectives and the research that has informed CL. This gives them a greater appreciation of why they need to implement it in a systematic and well-structured way if the benefits of this approach to learning are to be fully realised.

-           Teachers need to have the opportunity of discussing the key tenets of CL with their peers as they work on embedding it into their curricula. Teachers can be wonderfully supportive of each other, and many of the ideas that I’ve used in my research have emanated from discussions with classroom teachers.

-           The importance of establishing task interdependence is something that I’ve found cannot be underestimated. When children realise that all group members need to work together to complete the group task, they become more committed and willing to help each other than students who work in small groups where task interdependence is not clearly established. In these latter groups, students will often continue to work and help each other, but their potential to achieve more is often not realised.

-           The task the children are asked to work on in their groups needs to be cognitively challenging as well as one that will enable group members to engage in open discussion with each other. Establishing these types of tasks is often very demanding for the classroom teacher, but the outcomes achieved are well worth the initial planning.

-           Students need to be taught the interpersonal and small group skills required to help them manage their CL experiences. While I’ve found that teachers need to teach these skills very explicitly through role plays and modelling with primary-aged children, an open discussion format where ‘group behaviours’ are negotiated is often more appropriate with adolescents. Conflict is inevitable in any group situation but if students are provided with the skills to manage discord, the group is more likely to settle down and work productively together.

-           CL needs to be embedded in work that is meaningful to what the children are learning so that they see it as the way they learn and not something they do in small groups once a week.

-           Teachers need to set clear expectations for the quality of children's work. I’ve found from my own research that children like to produce a good quality product that will be acknowledged by both their teachers and peers because they derive a sense of achievement and success from their efforts which enhances their self-efficacy as learners.

Teachers play a key role in creating the conditions for successful CL. They do this not only by ensuring that many of the conditions listed above are in place, but also by modelling many of the behaviours they expect children to use in their groups. This includes modelling how to give and receive help as well as those behaviours that acknowledge and validate the efforts of others. I’d also like to suggest that teachers shouldn’t be too hesitant in probing and confronting anomalies in children’s thinking or understanding as well as offering tentative suggestions when children are unable to find a solution to a problem at hand. I know that teachers have traditionally been inclined to operate more as the guide on the side, but these behaviours (i.e., probing, confronting, suggesting) are designed to help mediate or scaffold learning so children have a better chance of resolving the difficulties they are confronting. Moreover, children respond well to the challenge these types of verbal behaviours impose.

Finally, I’ve found that CL is more likely to be successful when it is implemented in schools that embrace this approach to teaching and learning. That’s not to say that teachers shouldn’t contemplate using it if their school doesn’t actively endorse it. There are many teachers who have used CL in their classrooms without the support of the school. However, the benefits that accrue are more likely to be sustained and generalised to other school settings when the school (i.e., the principal and the administrative staff) have policies and practices that actively support its use.

References

Gillies, R. (2003a). The behaviours, interactions, and perceptions of junior high school students during small-group learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95, 137-147.

Gillies, R. (2003b). Structuring cooperative group work in classrooms. International Journal of Educational Research, 39, 35-49.

Gillies, R. & Ashman, A. (1998). Behaviour and interactions of children in cooperative groups in lower and middle elementary grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90, 746-757.

Gillies, R. & Ashman, A. (Eds.). (2003). Cooperative learning: The social and intellectual outcomes of learning in groups. London: RoutledgeFalmer

Robyn Gillies, PhD, is an associate professor in the School of Education, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia 4072. She can be contacted at: r.gillies@uq.edu.au