While the teacher’s role is currently mentioned in corporate reform involving technology, it is diminishing. Teachers are being replaced by outside partnerships who control how and what students learn.
Simultaneously, the student-to-student role is increasing. Students are being relied on to instruct each other.
This is exemplified in the term “collaboration.”
What collaboration used to mean.
- Teachers have students work in groups. When it works well, children come together, socialize, and learn from each other. Sometimes it doesn’t go well. One student dominates the group, or no one wants to lead, or a shy student gets left out of the conversation. Good teachers know when to intervene.
- Another use of the word collaboration is where teachers work with other teachers and staff. They discuss student progress and work on goals for the future.
The new definition of collaboration.
Corporate reform involves taking a familiar concept and twisting it to mean something different, not in a good way.
If reformers succeed, collaborative learning will be students working in online charter schools, at home, or a variety of other settings without teachers.
Traditional public schools will cease to exist. There will be no more teachers. That’s why student learning independence is critical.
The term collaboration where teachers work together on behalf of the student has changed too. It no longer means teachers getting together to discuss student progress.
It references, instead, outside partnerships and a merging of traditional public schools with charter schools. If we are not careful, we will eventually only have online charters run by corporations.
The new collaboration focus.
There are nonprofits designed to transform schools to this model. One is called the Center for the Collaborative Classroom. The other is the Center for Collaborative Education.
But can students, even the youngest learners, teach themselves through technology? If left to work by themselves will they learn without an adult to guide them?
It sounds strange. It is strange. But this transformation is happening in front of our very eyes!
To prove this point, here are quotes and issues that stand out from the collaborative learning websites.
- Teachers who use the Collaborative Classroom model make an intentional shift from having a classroom where they do the majority of the talking to constructing a learning situation and then facilitating it through student thinking and talking.
- The very success of our instruction hinges on students being able to work together and push each other’s thinking.
- Discussion about “intrinsic motivation” and children “constructing knowledge and engaging in action” runs rampant.
- Does the emphasis on “safe environments” here mean there will be many students in the room teaching each other without supervision?
- Social-emotional learning and academic learning are spoken of together. Students will be expected to behave if they are working on their school work by themselves.
- Students must extend their own thinking and expand on the thinking of their peers.
- Having the skills necessary to hold a substantive discussion is emphasized.
- Students must have enough content knowledge to build upon the thinking of others.
- There is much talk about Growth Mindset, getting children to believe they can do a task. This will help them work without a teacher.
Along with this, there is a push for students tutoring each other.
Certainly students can learn from each other, but the new collaboration is meant to take this a giant step further beyond what any of us can imagine.
Removing the teacher from the equation is a totally unproven, radical step that will change the nature of instruction forever. It’s scary to think about.
Collaboration. A word to watch out for. Let me know your thoughts. Thank you.
Great distinction made here with respect to teacher-facilitated collaborative experiences for student learning and intellectual-creative growth vs corporate-ed deform’s co-opted version of the term.
Thanks, Clyde!
Removing the teacher from the equation is NOT unproven, though I u sets tans why so many people think it’s scary. No one is saying kids no longer need adults. Kids will always need adults. They just don’t need us for the things they used to need us for. Unschooling & Sudbury models have been operating successfully for decades. Traditional schools are falling behind & that’s scary for them. Those of us moving forward with collaboration & self-directed Learning are not scared at all. We’re excited.
Well thank you for commenting because I always like contrary opinions. But I think your comment that “kids no longer need adults” is strange and I disagree.
I am a huge advocate for play and giving children the freedom to explore and learn on their own, but adults are still required to provide guidance. Great teachers do this and I think you would agree here. Even unschooling involves oversight.
The type of collaboration in my post is sitting children in front of screens 24/7 with children doing all the guidance. I’d say there’s no proof that works at all.
And the same individuals who have intentionally inflicted high-stakes testing and other terrible reforms on our public schools are now saying how children can learn without teachers and on digital devices.
History shows that public schools were never failing as we were led to believe. .
And learners differ with how much direction they require. Most parents want good schools with well-qualified human teachers who understand how children learn.
They want understanding and nurturing guides with a teaching degree from a reputable university.
My 10th graders got very engaged in an idea one of them brought up in a Socratic Seminar. They built on eachbother’s ideas and were collegial, collaborative and used proper persuasive language. Sounds great, right? Except that idea they were all excited about was that Atticus Finch had a thing going on with Calpurnia. This is why students can not instruct themselves.
That’s funny, Laura, and that describes high school well. Thanks.
Collaborative learning using technology will be a big flop, but it is sad that the children are the ones who will lose. I work as an Education Assistant, and I clearly see the results of all the fads. Sometimes the children go off on their own tangents, and no one is supervising them. You read the results of their collaborative learning, and you see naivete reflected in their thinking which it is as it should be because they have limited knowledge. Each group working on their own project produce very infantile work; they are not getting the benefit of an experienced an knowledgeable adult to guide them. They solve problems in their own inefficient way, without being instructed on how to work through problems methodically. The overall effect is that students as novice learners cannot build the required knowledge base that they would need for higher learning. They play around with finding multiple ways to solve math problems, and then as math becomes more sophisticated the foundation that should have been provided at the ground level is lost and then bricks will be piled on a shaky foundation, and they lose the opportunity to be proficient in subjects with well-structured domains. The people who promote collaborative learning certainly do not know the intellect required for independent learning.
You sound like an extremely wise Education Assistant with great observation skills. Thank you for a well-written explanation.
Totally agree with you, Arlene! Excellent response!
Graduate students teach each other. Highly motivated classes of homogeneous students can teacher each other something. We all learn in a culture of conversation. As Oppenheimer famously suggested, great physics discoveries happen over coffee. So do revolutions.
But none of this happens to those who have not had the opportunity to develop these skills. Left to their own devices, even if they are electronic, students will talk about Friday night.
I agree about college especially with the conversations over coffee. I remember those as being the best and interesting ways to communicate. Personally, I rarely enjoyed the formally organized groups in college classes. Most seemed disorganized and a waste of time. And that’s me.
But a little group work goes a long way with elementary children. They need teachers often to help them with it for it to work. Certainly they learn a lot through play, but adults help guide students to new vistas when it comes to schooling. I don’t think tech does that.
Thanks, Roy. You always give everyone food for thought!
I happen to think that if that is you, then you should be able to be you without being shoehorned into some educational mold that does not fit. Did Madame Curie have a lab partner?
Well, yes. It was Pierre. But they had a “glowing” relationship.
I get it. I bet when they were in high school it was Normale.
Online education is designed for everyone who is considering changing their career or are thinking about further studies while they are
working. Students can gain the accredited education they really want by signing up
for one of the available programs. I’m not praoclaiming that everyone does that,
I’m while we’re talking about the minority for
this one, but it just irritates the hell from me.
I do a lot of online courses, and the difference between a student seeking to acquire knowledge and I, is that I have a lot of content knowledge from different areas, and it is easy to acquire new knowledge. Some online courses are not easy-they are described as appropriate for people with no background knowledge, but when you begin you realize it is misleading. I have started many courses and abandoned them because I did not have the resources like acquiring an up to date text book that would provide me with adequate study material, but I have completed many more than I have abandoned, and I am also an autodidact with a natural curiosity for knowing which makes learning easy for me. I can tell you that independent learning is not for the faint of heart. A major skill that you need is that of immersive and analytical reading. If you should read the brilliant book the “Mind Tree” written by a boy with autism named Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay who opines that learning is easy once the will is there, but the average student does not readily have the will
I recently did a chemistry course on Reactions and Ratios, and I try to imagine a student who do not have a strong foundation in math and science attempting such a course. I had to imagine that because I was equipping myself to help my daughter who wants to change careers from accounting to industrial Mechanics. She is not very resilient, so I had to equip myself in case she should falter. This particular encounter has taught me that it is easy to say that students can learn on their own, but it is much harder to accomplish in reality because few students have the fundamental skills required for doing so.
I have realized that educationists do not follow developments in science that affects learning. I recently read about a theory in developmental psychology that attempts to explain why the idea of children learning naturally is fallacious. I do not blindly follow the ideas of the stock opinion, neither do I believe they are unhelpful, but I have realized that a lot of times as an observant layman, one can develop many ideas that are later supported by science, and the following idea is one that I have always played with in my mind when thinking about collaborative learning. How do students acquire domain knowledge from subjects with well structured domains, without the assistance of a knowledgeable other.
David C. Geary expounded the theory of different types of knowledge and how they are acquired. His theory is relevant to collaborative learning and turns the idea of collaborative learning on its head. He classifies knowledge as biologically primary knowledge and biologically secondary knowledge. The former is the knowledge we develop naturally as humans to be able to function : we learn to speak, to listen, to pay attention, because these are skills without which we cannot survive. The biologically secondary knowledge is what we go to school for, and what we would not naturally develop, For instance, a student will never on his or her own learn Pythagoras’ theorem or to find the slope of a line without being specifically taught, or how to factorize a polynomial, or even discovering the concept of a polynomial. The biologically secondary skills or domain knowledge of any content area must be specifically taught. I hope readers can see where I am heading; If biologically secondary knowledge must be learned why are we leaving students to naturally discover it? I have done several online courses in math and science, with the specific intent of finding out if without deliberately accessing the content from textbooks, or someone who already knows about it bringing it to my attention, if I may ever gain that knowledge naturally, and the answer is the same for student learning from collaborative learning – NO. Professionals with knowledge from different domains, can collaborate to solve a problem, but students with superficial knowledge will not succeed in acquiring domain specific knowledge through collaboration. Einstein and others like him already had a lot of domain knowledge that they augmented through intense study and research to make their discoveries; this is not the situation with the novice learners that inhabit schools.
I am forever perplexed by educationists who adopt or endorse ideas without subjecting them to scientific rigor. Sometimes I think that the goal is to make teachers irrelevant, but if you inhabit class rooms you would know otherwise. The truth is you would encounter very few students who are motivated to acquire knowledge without direction from someone already imbued with that knowledge.