Paperclip Newsletter -

Last updated 29th January 2010

Many thanks to the Mighty Wombat! I typed 'new year' and 'maths' into Google images because I wanted to tell you that we are adding lots more maths activities to the website. Our most recent is an activity on ratio and paint!

INFORMATION ABOUT WORKSHOPS COMING SOON HERE:

www.connectforlearning.org.uk/workshops.html

and scroll down the newsletter for further information on all our workshops this year!

CAMBRIDGE REVIEW VERY POSITIVE ABOUT COLLABORATIVE GROUP WORK

Summary of research on classroom organisation. Pages 289-90

Teachers should encourage exploratory talk, argumentation and participative discussion. Effective learning is developed in relationships between staff, children and peers rather than the individual child.

Groups in classrooms are often formed without a strategic view of their purpose, and there is little support for pupil-pupil interactions within groups. Pupils often struggle to work together in groups.

Recent pressures relating to the curriculum and the classroom context have resulted in an increasing heavy emphasis on whole class teaching with little room for group work. Pupils are likely to be seated in an arrangement that does not facilitate their learning. Pupils usually sit in groups but do not interact and work as groups.

Effective group work has a positive effect on pupils’ academic progress, higher conceptual learning, behaviour and relations with others, provided that teachers take time to train pupils in the skills of group working.

Schools need to look more deeply at their current practices regarding differentiation (especially setting and inflexible within-class grouping) and identify best practice on actual effects on pupil learning rather than rhetoric.

Varying pupil within class grouping for different activities offers more flexibility, facilitates movement between groups structured by ability and avoids limiting the opportunities for some children.

However, the evidence suggests that there are no consistent effects of structured ability grouping, such as setting, on attainment, although there can be detrimental affects on social and personal outcomes for some children. Teaching quality seems to be the most important factor in determining outcomes, although pupils in the top groups can have an enhanced educational experience.

When we first started work on collaborative group work in the 1980s, there was little research to support what seem in our experience the most effective way to encourage learning in multilingual, challenging classrooms. Now there is much more research to support our intuitions. All we need now are more courageous head teachers and less political interference. Lots of thanks to Mike Kent in TES 4872 for giving Ofsted a sound thrashing. Why not write to your MP and the eager person who wants to be your MP to let them know how you feel about government interference. After all they don't tell surgeons how to operate even though they give them lots of forms to fill in.

In the light of the chance (slightly more with Rose and much more with Alexander's recommendations) for more extended groupwork in primary, and to celebrate our first after twelve years History and Geography workshop in Southwark on 20th November, we are revising and updating some of the board games which we developed in the early nineties. The first to go online is the Aztecs Tributes Game. You can find a summary of this and a link on the American History page.

AND ANOTHER QUOTE FROM ROBIN ALEXANDER!

These are the final paragraphs from a chapter by Alexander "Culture, Dialogue and Learning: notes on an emerging pedagogy" in Neil Mercer and Steve Hodgkinson's new book "Exploring Talk in School"

There is a final challenge, and it underscores our earlier discussion of the need to relate the analysis of classroom talk to its contexts of pedagogy, policy and culture. Notwithstanding the appropriation of dialogic teaching by the QCA and the national strategies, some of our teachers feel that dialogic teaching's collective classroom ethic, and its emphasis on reciprocity and mutuality in learning, are being increasingly compromised by current government policy. In a culture of high stakes testing, which the UK government insists is here to stay, competition replaces collaboration, while coaching for recall against the clock subverts speculation, debate and divergence. Meanwhile, the emphasis on personalisation and choice may make the recent British espousal of the idea of classrooms as learning communities somewhat short lived.

Perhaps, therefore, the bowdlerisation of dialogic teaching by official agencies reflects not so much a failure to understand what it is about as a conscious attempt to force it to fit a framework; and a view of education, for which it is not really compatible. For it is hard to see how learning as dialogue can sit other than uncomfortably with teaching as compliance.

I hope this extract will want you to read more. The project has copies of this book for sale at 30% discount (£16) plus postage. I will bring copies to workshops if requested and it will be on sale at the next LATE conference.

A BIG THANK YOU

to colleagues who have been persuading other colleagues to come to our workshops. We do not have the funding to send out advertising and have always depended on you to tell others about our work. Like all the other professional associations and networks we had no support from the DSCF, nor the strategy until very recently. Now the strategy is being dismantled they are recognising that projects like ours and professional associations like NALDIC and NATE must regain their proper place in providing up to date, supportive training for schools. Please persuade schools to join the professional associations! Take a look at what they offer!

NALDIC NATE LATE ASE ATM Geography Association History Association Humanities Association

WORKSHOPS PLANNED SO FAR FOR THIS SCHOOL YEAR

We are very grateful to those LA teams who responded to our request for places to host workshops. We have planned an ambitious programme which we hope you will support. These workshops are open to colleagues from all neighbouring authorities, which is why we have planned a late start to help with travel and avoid expensive trains. We rely on colleagues to spread the word which is how we manage to keep costs low and still provide an excellent lunch.

Autumn Term 2009

You can access larger versions of these posters in jpg at: