Working with students in groups
Many of the ideas and principles that inform our work with students one-on-one also apply to working with them in group settings. But the dynamics are different. Our role, as has been made clear in previous sections of this book, is fluid and not easily pinned down to concrete definition, but if the idea of “coach” captures something accurate about our role in one-on-one sessions, the idea of “teacher” similarly applies when we find ourselves facilitating group sessions. So, we do have available to us the enormous swaths of scholarship related to the theory and practice of effective teaching to help guide us. And, again, there is Saundra Yancy McGuire’s Teach Students How to Learn as a step-by-step guide. Learning Strategists, however, are deprived of a central resource that traditional “classroom” teachers have in more abundant supply: time. Our group interactions are typically short-lived, often single-moment affairs. This limits possibility and makes more pressing to us what can and should be accomplished in those fleeting opportunities.
We have to decide upon our primary goal. Is it to dispense information? To build community? To create meaningful learning experiences? Naturally, like all good teachers, we will find some balance here, depending on the context. And this focus on our primary goal, our purpose, is the right one. I agree with Neil Postman’s assertion in The End of Education that educators tend to spend far too much time focused on the mechanics, the engineering of our enterprise, (how will I teach, what methods will I use, what format, will I use a Menti Poll, how will I capture attendance, will I gamify etc.), and neglect this focus on our purpose. It’s not that the mechanics don’t matter. They do. And we can draw upon various models of good teaching – Kolb’s model of experiential learning, Chickering’s principles of good practice, Gagne’s Eight Stages of Learning, or, my favourite, the Community of Inquiry Model described earlier. These models can help guide an effective process, drawing upon the scholarship of human learning and the conditions that foster it. So, of course, an effective group facilitator should be familiar with and invoke something other than just winging it.
But these considerations are meaningless without rooting ourselves in the much deeper and more difficult questions about purpose. I’m not talking about “learning outcomes” here, that common sensically useful yet ultimately banal concept, but something more fundamental: the formation of a common, shared narrative about why you are gathered together, teachers and students, in this place. It’s grandiose, yes. But why not? Surely there is reason for your work beyond simply providing some instrumental utility for students, as important as that may be. Answering the question “what is this for?” is , in my opinion, the foremost consideration, and one to be made before thinking about “how do I do it?” This is becoming a question harder and harder to respond to I think. It feels increasingly like big, aspirational, ideological, philosophical ideas about the “why” of education are getting squeezed out, and what once was considered the bedrock of educational thinking is now considered quaint, or pompous and pretentious – inducing eye-rolls and dismissiveness. It’s a kind of anti-intellectualism in favour of the merely practical. It then becomes easy to avoid the hard questions about why, and retreat into the easy questions about what and how of education – what do we teach, how do we teach. Never why do we teach – except as it relates to the, economic script, the practical, instrumental purposes of education.
The answer to that why question will ultimately be yours to make, but I would offer that our most fundamental purpose is to help students in our midst (re) discover an appreciation for the inherent value of learning, to understand that it is a painstaking process involving work and struggle and difficulty, and is gratifying, not despite this, but because of it. Students, of course, will arrive at our thresholds with other, more earthly concerns and these should not be ignored. We are, more concretely, helping students get in synch with the particular register of post-secondary academic culture and that entails teaching practical things beyond just an appreciation for learning. But I believe strongly that we should help students go beyond forms of thinking in which their only calculus for pondering their predicaments in higher education is an instrumental one.
Most Learning Strategists will intuitively understand that the dynamic of a group presents opportunities that are not present in a one-on-one session – the potential for peer connections to be made, the possibility for students to not only receive support/instruction but to give it, a greater diversity of perspectives, the sharing of common experiences etc. The “facilitator” then, must attend to this potentially more complex dynamic and create conditions where these group benefits can be enabled.
In a group environment, it’s important to think about setting an even safer, non-judgmental, non-biased tone since it’s a more vulnerable space ~ Heather Nelson
I do think this imperative is often misconstrued as having to ensure maximum comfort for the students. This is not the goal. A certain degree of discomfort is required for meaningful learning, and we do a great disservice to students if we spend our energy smoothing over the discomfort in the name of “safety”. Safety is not equivalent to comfort and discomfort does not imply a lack of safety. Nor does discomfort need to be considered a negative experience. What’s important for the facilitator is the framing of these experiences so that students are better primed to experience discomfort as a meaningful and necessary part of the learning experience.
Being rooted in these greater aspirations will allow us to begin considering the more practical concerns with clarity and attend to the question: how do I execute an effective group learning experience?
So, what are those practical concerns of group facilitation for Learning Strategists and what can guide practitioners in the design of these sessions? As mentioned, we have at our disposal a multitude of instructional design models to apply according to our inclinations. I will add here only a simple heuristic which can help broadly guide that process: Decide, Design, Present, Reflect.
Decide:
As I stressed above, the enterprise begins with some consideration of purpose and deciding what it is you want to do, what you want to teach, or accomplish. These considerations are rooted in two central questions: what do students need, and what do I have to offer. Much of this will be drawn from a traditional repertoire of learning strategy workshop fare – topics like notetaking, exam preparation, time-management, motivation and procrastination etc., but the beauty of the work is also being able to operate outside these confines. It is not about being cutesy or flashy, which can often be the curse of co-curricular programming influenced by empty marketing tactics. Don’t mistake style for substance or participant numbers for impact. Students are not customers, and you are not vendors. Listen to them, try to deeply understand their learning predicament, ask them what they need, draw from your own experience, consult with others, and let those things guide your decision.
Design:
The idea, the topic, the focus now formed, raises the next set of considerations about how best to express it – the truly creative part of learning strategy work. We are, most of us, deeply predisposed to the basic vernacular of the western teaching tradition. That places a useful set of constraints upon the design process. The variations on that theme are not limitless. But it’s still a big canvas. And, indeed, that traditional western vernacular is itself disrupt-able. So, there is ample room for creative expression in the design of your venture. I’m not suggesting that you are engaging in an artistic performance, or that a simple lecture with power point is not a legitimate choice. The multimodality of spoken words, text, and images is an accessible format and, when done coherently, can be pedagogically sound design for everyone. But let’s face it, the slide show default has taken some of the life out of teaching. Again, fidelity to your intention is key and your design choices should be in service to that intention. Perhaps that over-used word “curation” is more apt than “design”. Museum curators make decisions about what works of art to display, what groupings to establish, what meaning is to be assigned etc. This becomes the visitor’s experience, great art as framed by the curator’s particular perspective. That’s a helpful analogy for the instructional designer, and like the museum curator, you will be driven by your fundamental questions: Do you want to deliver content? Do you want to nurture connections among participants? Do you want to generate conversation? Do you want to disrupt preconceptions? All of the above? So, essentially your design will be composed of three things:
- The “package” of content to be curated (the topic and its relevant detail)
- The “form” that package will take (the way in which that content is presented)
- The “classroom” dynamic (the ways in which students will interact with that content).
Again, Moore’s theory of Transactional Distance is useful here – describing that spectrum between high structure on one end, high dialogue on the other – an inverse relationship. An example of highly structured design might be: a single topic, say, notetaking practices and its conventional tenets; presented straightforwardly in a Power Point presentation; delivered in lecture style by the presenter. Nothing wrong with that – a perfectly appropriate design for certain purposes. On the other end of the spectrum, a high-dialogue design might be: a complex topic like, say, motivation to learn considered from multiple perspectives, presented through video clips of student interviews, used as provocations to generate freeform conversation among the participants – also a legitimate, but very different design choice. Learning Strategists can play in the space between those extremes.
Present:
This is an interesting word, having a kind of applicable triple-meaning – as a verb meaning deliver or show, as an adjective meaning in place, and as a noun meaning gift. The verb. In your teaching mode, you will be a presenter of sorts, making visible the contents of your design, the information to be shared. You will, according to your style, make a presentation, stage an exhibition of the relevant topic, and associated insights and scholarship. The adjective. The foremost consideration for a facilitator of groups, as it is in one-on-one sessions, is establishing conditions that are conducive to effective learning. As the central node in that endeavour you will need to be fully present, to exist meaningfully and authentically in that space, to be in real attendance and available, and to ensure some combination of social, cognitive, and teaching presence permeates it all. The noun. Invoking the idea of teaching as a form of gift-giving, an idea often integral to indigenous forms of education and knowledge-sharing. There is, in good “classrooms”, a kind of exchange that happens, not as mere transaction between giver and receiver, but something reciprocal. We overuse the word “sharing” and strip it of its meaning, but it’s an apt idea for teachers to remember – their work as an act, not of authority, but of generosity. You have gifts of insight to share and so do the students in your midst.
In creating collaborative learning spaces, it’s about us (the facilitators) stressing quickly and often that the students have something valuable to contribute ~Carol Ducharme
Reflect:
A willingness to experiment and reflect is essential, in my opinion. Educators fall easy victim to deeply ingrained habits of interpretation and practice, develop a kind of muscle-memory that becomes hard to resist. Perhaps the best way to usefully disturb these patterns is in the observations of others, your colleagues. I think of the golfer whose way of swinging the club remains the same year after year with predictable results to their game until a sudden breakthrough comes in observation of another golfer whose swing they admire. Muscle memory in the service of mastering a craft is a worthy pursuit made more effective with punctuations of muscle confusion, but only if you take the time to stop and think upon these moments. I will offer more on this idea of reflection in the next section.
I will add as a final thought that I admit to some leeriness about “models” of good teaching or educational design even the loose one I offered above. Not because they have no value but because they can induce a kind of mechanical enactment of pedagogy. I believe that, as teachers, educators, learning strategists, who we are is more important than what we do. That sounds like a bit of a platitude, but it’s important. Your presence in a classroom, your humanity, curiosity, care, desire, attention, should always precede technique. Students will always appreciate a sense of organization, intentional purpose, and logical flow, and the technique of models can help enable that. But, in my experience, the best educational moments come not from the effective performance of a teacher, but from the improvisations of a group passing time well together. In this sense, the role of the Learning Strategist as teacher is simply to provide intelligent, well-informed provocations on a subject, and create the conditions whereby those provocations can be explored. And, upon those efforts, we should bring a constant state of presence and curiosity so we can reflect and respond in and after the moment. I leave it to you to discover and apply other prescriptive techniques that can guide you, but I offer no other model than that. And I further suggest a sense of experimentation, lest you get bogged down in a habitual method. Over the years, you may have developed a workshop on subject x or y, that runs like a well-oiled machine. That’s great. But I suggest, now and then, throwing caution to the winds and arriving at your next one without the safety net of that method. Enter the classroom with no plan at all, just a subject and your own curiosity. And try all the gradations of planning in between those two extremes. In the end, it’s one of the inevitabilities of teaching that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Again, a musical metaphor – the band plays every night and each night the vibe changes. All members know when the groove is fully there and things hum. These are the best nights. But other nights, that hum just doesn’t happen, but there is music nevertheless.
