After spending so long teaching children sitting in rows, facing the front, during the pandemic, it wouldn’t be a surprise if some of us had forgotten just how powerful group work can be.
Often teachers find the idea of pupils sitting quietly and working independently more appealing than the noise and activity that comes from group work - not least because we are forever being told that we should be trying to cut down on the distractions that can create excessive cognitive load.
However, we may not need to worry about that quite as much as we might think. In a 2011 study, Femke Kirschner and colleagues show that “the collective working memory effect” means that collaborative learning is likely to be more effective than individual learning when the complexity of the learning material is high.
In other words, when the task is particularly tricky, with multiple aspects and chunks of information, more heads can be better than one.
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But, despite these benefits, there is still a time and a place for group work, as a 2019 study by Jimmy Zambrano and colleagues shows.
The researchers set out to determine whether learning in groups is still more effective than individual learning when you take prior knowledge into account. They found that when learners have gaps in their knowledge, collaborative learning is likely to be more effective than individual learning. In this instance, the prior knowledge of one pupil can fill the gap of another.
How teachers can make the most of group work
However, the reverse is true when pupils have the complete prior knowledge needed for a task - in this scenario, individual learning is more likely to be superior to collaborative learning.
So, when planning group work, teachers must first ask themselves if the task is complex enough to warrant collaborative thinking, and then consider the knowledge that each pupil will bring to the task.
If pupils have the prerequisite knowledge and understanding to achieve success individually, then a collaborative task may not be the best choice, as pupils will not need the input from each other - unless the task is particularly complex.
But if you know that pupils’ prior knowledge will have gaps, and in different areas, then a collaborative task is likely to be much more effective than leaving pupils to toil over the task on their own.
In this case, it is important to choose collaborative tasks in which success relies on pupils contributing in different ways, filling each other’s gaps in prior knowledge, effectively cutting down the load on the collective working memory.
Overall, the key takeaway is that if a task is broad and differentiated, with gaps here and there for different pupils, then collaborative learning is likely to be rich and rewarding.
There are, though, nuances to consider around this.
There will always be children who sit in a group, panicked, feeling unable to contribute because of the large gaps in their knowledge. To mitigate against this, teachers could give these children a preliminary task around specific knowledge that will then support them to contribute.
Equally, we shouldn’t throw any pupils into collaborative group work without giving them instructions on how to collaborate effectively and manage shared thinking. This includes how to capture and evaluate each other’s ideas, as well as how to take turns and listen to each other.
If we can do that, then we will help children to develop abilities that will prove valuable not just in group tasks but throughout their lives.
Beth Budden is an assistant headteacher at John Ball Primary School, in south-east London, and a PhD candidate at IOE/UCL. She blogs at bethbudden@wordpress.com and tweets @bethbudden
