I watched a couple of podcasts - Ken Robinson on RS Animate - "Changing Educational Paradigms" and Sugata Mitra's "The Child-Driven Education" TED Talk. Though these had different topics, they both were strong proponents for students working in collaborative groups. In the work world, we are hardly ever asked to do tasks by ourselves, so why are we still asking kids to discover, brainstorms, and learn solitarily?
My Math class is entirely basked on group work. I have 4 groups of 4 and have recently tried separating the groups by gender. (The jury is still out on whether that is helpful or not - the girls are working well together and my rambunctious boy is still eagerly leading his group off task...) This afternoon when 1 group was not focused, I went over to them, sat down, and told them the story of Sugata Mitra's experiments in India and abroad that showed that students can figure out complex concepts by themselves. (Of course, I left out the part that said, "children will learn to do what they want to do" - because my guys truly were not interested in solving 2-step equations using pictures!) Anyway, I built them up - that I knew they were fully capable, that working together was so much better than trying to work on their own, and that they could figure out anything without a teacher spoon-feeding them everything. I was pleasantly surprised that for the last 25 minutes of class they were able to do just that - work together and discover the steps to solving equations.
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