The IAIE (International Association for Intercultural Education) is planning its next major conference, in cooperation with the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES). The conference will take place from September 3-7, 2007: www.iaie.org.

Johnson, B. (2003). Teacher collaboration: Good for some, not so good for others. Educational Studies, 29(4), 337-350.

This paper examines the outcomes of four Australian schools’ efforts to promote greater collaboration between teachers in each school. Teachers’ responses to questions about the nature and extent of collaboration they experienced at school revealed that teaming arrangements were in place in the four schools studied. Collaborative ways of working helped most teachers feel better about themselves and their work, and provided them with opportunities to learn from each other. However, a minority of teachers were negative about the new teaming arrangements claiming that the changes had led to an increase in their workloads, a loss of professional autonomy, and the emergence of damaging competition between teams for resources, recognition and power. The paper concludes with a call for further micropolitical work that problematises apparently self evident goods like teacher collaboration.

King, P. E. [P.King@tcu.edu], & Behnke, R. R. (2005). Problems associated with evaluating student performance in groups. College Teaching, 53(2), 57-61.

Using small groups in student cooperative learning enterprises has become a major trend in American higher education (Cheng and Warren 2000). However, several practical issues involving the assessment of an individual's performance in groups have sometimes created resistance to the method from both students and parents (Kagan 1995). This article evaluates the case for using cooperative group assignments and the problems associated with evaluating the performances of individuals working in groups. Practical suggestions for minimizing some of the potential problems associated with group grading are offered and some philosophic perspectives on this form of grading are advanced.

Gossett, M. [GOSSET2@aol.com], & Fischer, O. (2005). Bringing together critical thinking and cooperative learning between two schools. Strategies, 19(2), 27-30.

** Two physical education teachers describe how they use cooperative learning to promote cross-curricular learning and critical thinking. The lesson explained in the article involved language arts, with students using brainstorming and writing to do a “Create a Game” activity. Students at two schools worked in groups of 4-5. Each group developed a game, including the game’s name, purpose, equipment, directions, and rules of play (including safety rules). The game description from the groups at each school were sent to the other school, where students used the description to play the game, videotaped the play, and sent the tape to the students who had created the game. Assessment issues are discussed.

Dellicarpini, M. [dellicarpini@lehman.cuny.edu] (2006, March). Scaffolding and differentiating instruction in mixed ability ESL classes using a Round Robin activity. Internet TESL Journal, 12(3). Retrieved February 13, 2006, from http://iteslj.org/Techniques/DelliCarpini-RoundRobin.html

** One challenge many ESL/EFL teachers at the secondary and adult level face is teaching mixed ability classes. Issues that emerge for educators are successful differentiation of instruction, successful grouping strategies, creating well structured cooperative activities and integrating meaningful content for these older learners who may struggle with first and second language literacy skills. Using a Round Robin technique can help the teacher successfully address the aforementioned challenges and provide a meaningful, interactive activity that helps develop both Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) (Cummins, 1979), both necessary to the success of English language learners. This article will detail a technique that ESL/EFL teachers can successfully integrate in their mixed ability classes and facilitate the development of necessary skills.

Yang, A., Chan, A., Ho, L. K., & Tam, B. (2005). Does an open forum promote learning among students? A collaborative-learning approach. Asian EFL Journal, 7(3), 88-97. Retrieved February 12, 2006, from http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/September_05_ay.php

This paper investigates how students responded to each other in an e-Community learning situation. Forty students, at two levels, were invited to respond to five questions regarding the Legislative Council election 2004 posted on the school forum. Questionnaires and interviews were conducted to see if students enjoyed the discussion with peers and casual browsers. It has been concluded that students find the forum discussion useful toward their formal curriculum. However, there have been concerns regarding the objectivity of casual browsers. Students need to be on the alert when receiving information through the Internet and other media, and understand that not everything printed or broadcast is official, factual, and accurate.

Mynard, J., & Almarzouqi, I. (2006). Investigating peer tutoring. ELT Journal, 60(1), 13-22.

This article gives an overview of a piece of qualitative research conducted at a women’s university in the United Arab Emirates. The aim of the study was to evaluate the English language peer tutoring programme in order to highlight benefits and challenges, and to make informed improvements. The study drew particularly on participant perceptions and observations of the programme. It identified various benefits for tutors such as learning through teaching and become more responsible while doing something worthwhile to help others. Benefits for tutees included improved levels of self-confidence and English language aptitude. The study also highlighted several challenges associated with the high dependence and low metacognitive awareness demonstrated by the tutees. In addition, tutors were not always able to offer appropriate assistance. Improvements to the programme could include increasing faculty involvement, improving tutee awareness of the aims of the programme, and providing additional assistance to tutors.

McIntyre, E., Kyle, D. W., & Moore, G. H. (2006). A primary-grade teacher's guidance toward small-group dialogue. Reading Research Quarterly, 41(1), 36–66.

The purpose of this study was to describe how one primary teacher of poor and working class rural students promoted small-group dialogue about books and literary concepts. Specifically, we focused on how she guided the students from the beginning of a lesson in ways that later led to dialogue during a videotaped four-day lesson sequence. We analyzed interactions of teacher-student talk during the sequence that involved reading, talking about, and responding to mysteries. Coding involved labeling “indicators” of instructional conversation outlined by Dalton (1997), coding other features of dialogue derived from theory, such as use of encouragement and pace for purposes of increasing thinking, and coding what we called “democratic supports,” such as providing opportunities for student decision making. Findings contribute to the field's growing literature on classroom dialogue in primary-grade classrooms in three ways. First, teacher-fronted talk and true dialogue are not mutually exclusive; the former can be used to achieve the other. The teacher highlighted in this study, Gayle, purposefully used heavy teacher-fronted discourse, emphasizing telling, defining, and modeling at the beginnings of her lessons, which appeared to be critical to students' eventual participation. Secondly, additional instructional patterns not often illustrated in the literature or dialogue in the classroom, such as nonevaluative responses, encouragement rather than praise, examples and suggestions, and linguistic and paralinguistic cues such as pacing of talk and hand gestures, all appeared to assist students' participation. The teacher moved from careful, planned mediated action to spontaneous, genuine responses within the dialogic episodes. Finally, this study confirms other studies which suggest that classroom culture, characterized by a problem-solving environment, student decision making, student choice, collaborative work, and product-driven work, affects students' participation and subsequent construction of meaning during small-group dialogue.

McAfee, A. P. (2006). Enterprise 2.0: The dawn of emergent collaboration. MIT Sloan Management Review, 47(3), 21-28. [The author’s blog is available at http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee]

There is a new wave of business communication tools including blogs, wikis and group messaging software — which the author has dubbed, collectively, Enterprise 2.0 — that allow for more spontaneous, knowledge-based collaboration. These new tools, the author contends, may well supplant other communication and knowledge management systems with their superior ability to capture tacit knowledge, best practices and relevant experiences from throughout a company and make them readily available to more users….The resulting organizational communication patterns can lead to highly productive and highly collaborative environments by making both the practices of knowledge work and its outputs more visible. …. First, it is necessary to create a receptive culture in order to prepare the way for new practices. Second, a common platform must be created to allow for a collaboration infrastructure. Third, an informal rollout of the technologies may be preferred to a more formal procedural change. And fourth, managerial support and leadership is crucial. Even when implanted and implemented well, these new technologies will certainly bring with them new challenges….Leaders will have to play a delicate role if they want Enterprise 2.0 technologies to succeed. [the following section was not part of the original abstract]  Leaders, the author writes, “have to at first encourage and stimulate use of the new tools, and then refrain from intervening too often or with too heavy a hand.” Otherwise, they may “wind up with only a few online newsletters and white-boards, used for prosaic purposes.”

Berry, J., & Sahlberg, P. [psahlberg@worldbank.org] (2006). Accountability affects the use of small group learning in school mathematics. Nordic Studies in Mathematics Education, 11(1), 3-29. [Editor’s note: Pasi Sahlberg is an IASCE Board member]

This study investigates the perspectives of a sample of teachers on the use of cooperative small groups in the teaching and learning of mathematics. We asked teachers (N = 18) in England and Finland about their experiences and ideas of small group learning in mathematics. The research tool used the ordering by each teacher of eight mathematics tasks into a hierarchy from those tasks that are best for small group working to those tasks that are best for individual working as a frame for in-depth interviews. We conclude that the role of small group learning as seen by most of the teachers is for doing mathematics, introducing social skills and discussion rather than learning mathematical knowledge and skills. Furthermore we report on the barriers to using small group learning caused by the accountability structures inherent in the educational systems of both countries.

 *       Abstract from ERIC - http://www.eric.ed.gov.
**      Abstract is the introduction to the article
***    Abstract written for this compilation