Collaboration

Hattie is a great admirer of Shayer’s seminal work on cognitive acceleration which built on the principles developed by both Vygotsky and Piaget. Shayer and colleagues demonstrated through the Cognitive Acceleration for Science Education (CASE) project that critical and creative engagement with received knowledge is effective in science learning as it is in the arts and humanities. They found that such interventions have a permanent effect on student’s capabilities and that the effects transfer to other subject areas with students achieving, on average, a grade higher than previously predicted for maths and English as well as science (Shayer, 1999; 2003). CASE promotes peer

collaboration as essential to the process, with students playing roles in their problem solving tasks that in a Vygotskyan way extend their scope, making them a head taller than normal. Shayer describes how a CASE lesson works in principle, borrowing a performance metaphor of Acts. The lesson plan moves through Act 1 – in which the teacher sets up the task - to Act 2 which is the CZA (Construction Zone Activity) where the element of

cognitive conflict or problem solving is introduced. Students work in groups to solve the problem by negotiating externally with each other (and the knowledge and ability each other brings to the task) and internally with their own knowledge and ability challenged both by the content and process of the task. This is followed in Act 3 by a plenary through which students share and question other groups, thereby consolidating their individual

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learning through this social process. This last Act includes teacher guided metacognition of how and what they have learned.

Shayer describes the teacher’s role in Act 2:

During Act 2 the teacher’s main task is the class scan. He/she only intervenes to enhance group energy where it flags, or to drop in the right question to induce cognitive conflict where a group has become complacent at too low a level of processing […] It is her job to manage the lesson so that peer–peer mediation is maximised, a very different skill from ordinary instructional teaching. (2003, p.483)

As Shayer highlights, this approach requires different skills from the traditional teacher role and the pedagogy described here will still be more readily familiar to a drama teacher than a science teacher. As a young teacher in the early 1990s, I spent a year teaching science in a comprehensive school. CASE was a new buzzword among my colleagues, with the project starting to achieve success. Those were early days but my drama background allowed me to feel far more comfortable with the approaches

suggested than my science trained colleagues who questioned the rigour of the approach, particularly that the students had any worthwhile experiences to bring to bear on the problems tackled. In agreement with Shayer and advocates of a co-constructivist approach, Dewey (1938, p.21) recognises that engaging with the experiences a student brings to the classroom is a more challenging role for the teacher than transmitting the experience of received knowledge: ‘basing education upon personal experience may mean more multiplied and more intimate contacts between the mature and the

immature than ever existed in the traditional school, and consequently more, rather than less guidance by others.’ Alexander (2008, p.50) notes the challenge as requiring ‘a conceptual map of what is to be taught, the ability to think laterally within and beyond that map, and an appreciation of where children are ‘at’ cognitively and what kind of intervention will scaffold their thinking from present to desired understanding’. LPN teacher Kathy would agree noting, ‘This type of co-construction is not without difficulties since it requires fluid planning and often quick thinking on the part of the teacher’ (Irish, 2014b, p.3).

Hattie’s focus on the role of the teacher and his conditions for what makes an expert teacher can seem idealistic or overly demanding for busy teachers working under stressful conditions but his call is for a more collaborative climate where trust is as important for teachers as it is for students. He rates teachers working together in a

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community of practice to improve their impact on students’ learning as achieving one of the highest effect sizes of his findings at 0.93 (2013). Collaborative working requires ‘a caring, supportive staffroom, a tolerance of errors, and for learning from other teachers, a peer culture among teachers of engagement, trust, shared passion and so on’ (2009, p.240) The same attributes, he points out, that work for students, and which theatre practice recognises as ensemble (further explored in chapter six). LPN teacher Emily notes the change collaborative working made to her teaching: ‘Working as an ensemble

instantly changes the class dynamic. The feeling of playfulness, the change of energy, the instant engagement suddenly allows the teacher to see students construct understanding for themselves.’ Another LPN teacher Mark quotes his Year 8 student who told an Ofsted inspector ‘I know I am making progress because the teacher is not telling me the answers, I am finding them for myself.’

Although Hattie credits teachers with immense agency over their students’ learning, he also acknowledges that ‘it is students themselves, in the end, not teachers, who decide what students will learn’ (2009, p.241). He cites the work of fellow New Zealander, Graham Nuthall (2005) on the three worlds that intersect in the classroom: the public world of activity shared with the teacher; the private-social world of peer interactions; and the private-individual world where personal meaning is formed. Hattie summarises Nuthall’s findings:

students lived in a personal and social world of their own in the classroom, they already knew at least 40 per cent of what the teachers intended them to learn, a third of what each student learned was not learned by any other student in the class, students learned how and when the teacher would notice them and how to give the appearance of active involvement, and a quarter of the specific concepts and principles that students learned were critically dependent on private peer talk or on self-designed activities or use of resources (2005, cited in Hattie, 2009, p.241)

These findings emphasise the value of creating independent learners, willing, interested and able to further their own learning and confident in understanding the value of making personal analogies to help them learn. A study by Nuthall (2007) found that whatever their prior level of ability, the students who made most progress were those with a pragmatic approach to making the classroom work for them rather than those who did everything they were told but without a sense of personal investment. Nuthall’s findings highlight the unique nature of how we each process meaning and the value of co- operative learning strategies that allow students to share and explore meanings. Hattie

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finds that structured opportunities for co-operative rather than individualistic learning result in a greater probability of increases, not only in students’ well-being and openness to learning but also in academic achievement and the interpersonal skills that will make young people successful in adult life (2009, pp.213-4; 2012, p.78). To this end, he advises against ‘prescription strategies’ that use particular methods or scripts since these will not create personalised or independent learning. An ensemble of teachers and students requires not just trust, but respect for the plurality of perspectives. It depends on sharing of meanings through analogies and an acknowledgement of the value of analogy and narrative in how we learn. In Hattie’s words:

We learn best by interacting with the ideas, by deliberately rephrasing the ideas, and by finding ‘coat hangers’ to link to previous notions (or examples) […] Stories and example cases tend to be remembered better than facts and abstract principles’ (2012, p.101).

Hattie’s message ultimately is that each student and each teacher is unique and teaching must therefore be allowed to flourish as an art, a practice, rather than a prescribed set of approaches.