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Colin Hill is a Key Stage 1 teacher at Birkdale Primary School in Southport.
He wanted to help his pupils develop positive attitudes towards learning, and each other, by helping them to develop their skills for effective group work through the use of exploratory talk. He also wanted to help them to:
Colin noticed that when he gave his pupils group activities they struggled to work together effectively. Some pupils took a strong lead while others had no active participation. He identified one particular group of pupils (two boys and four girls) where the dynamics often caused these activities to end in conflict.
Colin drew on a variety of research resources, including Research of the Month, to plan a series of six speaking and listening sessions designed to help pupils develop their skills for group work. See Making effective use of research and evidence to complete a TLA project.
Colin used the first session to evaluate his pupils’ current skills. He gave them a stick sorting task and explained that they needed to talk about their reasons for placing the stick in a particular location. Colin found at first that two boys took the lead roles in completing the activity at the expense of their peers, and the session ended in conflict after only four minutes.
Colin used the next four sessions to support his pupils to develop their speaking and listening skills.
In the second session he introduced basic rules, including not interrupting one another and putting a hand up to ask a question, and only allowed pupils to speak when they were holding a ‘turn taking’ ball. He planned this session to be deliberately short (10 minutes) as he thought the new talking rule could have thwarted full participation.
In this session he found more participation from all of the pupils, although the two boys still had trouble waiting to take their turn.
Colin used the third, fourth and fifth sessions to develop his pupils’ skills further by getting them to complete collaborative activities in which he:
Colin used the final session to assess the progress his pupils had made by asking them to complete an open ended activity where children had to argue their case for their own interpretation and come to a consensus. The pupils had to order the pictures of a cat and a snail to make a logical story, but one of the pictures didn’t fit. He found that in this session all the pupils participated and shared their thoughts and ideas more constructively.
Colin found that his pupils:
He was amazed at the impact of such a simple approach and started to think about how he could use the sessions with other groups in his class, including lower and higher ability groups. He trialled the same six sessions with a group of lower ability pupils and found that they needed a lot more support to secure their learning, including the repetition of some sessions.
Colin shared his learning with his mentor and is planning to deliver in service training to his colleagues to share his learning and encourage them to try similar activities.
What is the quality of interactions among the pupils in your classes? Would it be valuable video recording, or asking a colleague to observe a section of a lesson to get a clear idea of this? How appropriate would it be to apply Colin’s sequence of sessions to increase interaction among your pupils? What could you keep the same and what would you need to adapt?
You can find out more by reading the following RoM tasters:
in the Group work taster pack (PDF, 150kb); and
in the Pupil talk taster pack (PDF, 139kb).
