Enhancing pupil dialogue in collaborative group work

published:August 2009

We chose this case study to illustrate a way of promoting effective dialogue and group work.  A whole school focus on literacy skills in one of the two secondary schools involved in the study helped the mathematics departments to explore the difficulty many students found when communicating their thinking and reasoning in extended investigative tasks and GCSE coursework and in the mathematics curriculum generally. The aims of the study were:

• to investigate how different pupil groupings affected pupil dialogue, and
• to develop and evaluate strategies and resources to support collaborative group work and pupil dialogue.

How did teachers set about developing their students’ group discussion skills?
The teachers undertook a number of ‘research lessons’ that provided a baseline and opportunities for intervention. The teachers selected ‘case pupils’ to represent different sections of the class, then planned a lesson, or lessons, with these pupils in mind. One member of the research team taught the lessons, whilst other members made observations and recordings of the case pupils’ behaviour and responses to the lessons. After each lesson the research team met to analyse the data they had collected and use it for planning the subsequent lesson. For example, the Year 8 series of research lessons included:

• lesson 1 – observing unstructured group work
  Pupils were asked to work together on a mathematical investigation with no guidelines for group work. Teachers made and analysed audio recordings to find out how far pupils engaged in talk for learning.
• lesson 2 – structured group work
  Teachers held a class discussion aimed at producing ‘ground rules for working in groups’, such as, ‘give reasons to back up anything you say’. They also restructured some of the groups so that pupils were working with others of the same gender and of closer ability to their own.
• lesson 3 – structured group work (higher ability set) and ‘Blip-Blop’ activity
  Teachers provided ground rules and arranged pupils in single-sex, similar ability friendship groups. The task – Blip-Blop problems – encouraged pupils to discuss processes they would use to solve problems. (All values had been replaced by nonsense words, for example ‘Sam has baba packets of sweets. Each packet has gaga sweets in it. Sam gives away nana sweets from each pack, etc. How many sweets does he have left?’) One member of staff taught the lesson and two colleagues observed and recorded pupil discussions.

What did the teachers learn about designing the curriculum?
Overall, the teachers found that group work was an effective way of promoting talk for learning, particularly when they took steps to make it structured. Without the ground rules, most of their students’ talk was cumulative (repetitions, confirmations and elaborations), with some disputational talk (disagreements and individual decision-making) but little evidence of exploratory talk, where students explained and justified their decisions. The teachers also found that homogeneous groupings (based on gender, ability or level of communication skill) led to more frequent constructive dialogue, particularly where the groups were composed of girls.

Reference
Corina Seal, Sweyne Park – Secondary School, Essex.
How can we encourage pupil dialogue in collaborative group work?
National Teacher Research Panel Conference (2006) summary