There is a paucity of research which focuses exclusively on teacher discourse during collaborative learning (Gillies & Boyle, 2008). There are studies back as far as 1990 that found that when engaged in whole class discussion with students, teachers were on the whole very formal, giving instructions, collective praise and collective discipline (Hertz-Lazarowitz & Shachar, 1990 cited in Sharan & Sharan, 1992). When interacting with small groups of students the teachers were more encouraging, more helpful and gave more specific feedback
66
to students. Building off the work of Hertz-Lazarowitz & Shachar, Gillies (2006) identified six teacher behaviours when dealing with collaborative groups:
1. Teacher control: Instructing, lecturing, providing mechanical reinforcement to students, and reinforcement expressing comparisons between the children’s performances, initiative, or behaviours)
2. Questions: Short questions and open questions designed to elicit expected information 3. Discipline: discipline comments directed at individual students, groups, or the whole class 4. Mediation: paraphrases to assist understanding, prompts, uses open questions in a
tentative manner to promote thought about an issue the student is focused on, mediates learning between students to encourage engagement about an issue.
5. Encouragement: praises student’s, group’s, and class efforts, encourages interactions among students and expresses spontaneous emotion
6. Maintenance interactions: helps the student during learning, refers to the problem task without punishing, refers to technical problems in carrying out the task, and language needed to maintain the activity
Gillies found that when compared to teachers teaching in a traditionally structured class with periods of whole class teaching and individual work, teachers employing collaborative learning structures were more likely to engage in questioning, mediated learning behaviours and make fewer disciplinary remarks (2006, p285).
In subsequent work the concept of teacher mediating learning was explored further and five subcategories of mediated learning were identified (Gillies & Boyle, 2008):
Challenging basic information
Using cognitive and meta-cognitive reasoning
Prompting
67
Asking open questions
Validating and acknowledging students efforts.
The major difficulty with the work of Gillies and Boyle is the role ascribed to questions. To treat questions as an end rather than a means underestimates their versatility and ultimately their potential use in teacher student interactions. Questions can take on so many forms and be used for a multiplicity of purposes from classroom management to
abstract reasoning (Smith & Higgins, 2006; Beauchamp & Kennewell, 2010). The advantages of the Engle and Conant four category scheme is that it is inclusive of questioning in each of its categories, it also can apply to both mediated and unmediated utterances, situating them in the teachers’ efforts to structure class learning.
A very different approach to understanding teacher interaction with students in a collaborative activity was taken by Greiffenhagen (2011). He argued that an
ethnomethodological study could help tackle the lack of understanding about this area of teacher pedagogy because an ethnomethodological exploration significantly differed from discourse analysis in its approach. Rather than look for hidden meaning and underlying patterns it just dealt with what was discernible on the surface. Griffenhagen’s analysis of a secondary school teacher’s ICT lessons in a computer suite grouped the behaviours of the teacher he observed into the following five areas:
Ratifying:
Students expect that teacher will stop and look at work as part of their rounds. One function was to keep students focused on the teacher's educational aims, not just on what they found interesting.
Making suggestions:
Teacher tried not to impose their authority and will but to stretch students, making the task more complicated and challenging.
Maintain classroom control:
The teacher equated classroom discipline with students sitting at their desk, not talking too loudly and appearing to be working.
68
Making whole class
announcements:
The teacher’s reason for sharing was that it was likely that other students would encounter the same problem; sharing solution would save time and effort.
Linking the activity to the exams:
Activities may have been seen as worthwhile standalone exercises, but most are embedded in the larger programme of work of preparing students for an exam.
The behaviours observed by Grieffenhagen are similar in many respects to those already noted by Engle & Conant and Gillies and her collaborators. Unlike Gillies, both Griffenhagen and Engle & Conant make explicit reference to whole class interventions during the session. Neither treats group work and whole classwork as separate entities but see links between them. This is not something which is explicitly covered in much of the teacher interaction literature.
Griffenhagen also links the interactions to the wider context of exams which frame activity and add a meaning and context that give them a dual relevance. Students are not just working to improve their skills. They are preparing themselves for external high-stakes assessment in the future. Such reminders are another form of accountability which students are familiar with and one which it is not possible for them to forget even when trying to apply other disciplinary norms to their work. This reinforces the reality that the voice of the teacher and the learner in classroom dialogic interactions are not the voices of equals but the voices of Magisterial and Novice (see section 1.2).
Engle and Conant focus on the process of interaction rather than its wider context, regarding the teacher as responsible for class management and reporting that teachers and students responded accordingly to this. For them the teacher is supposed to have a visible and uniquely different role. Their stance is a pragmatic one. Where difficulties arise however, is their assertion that the teacher holds the students accountable to the norms of the discipline under investigation (Engle & Conant, p.400). However, the notion of disciplinary norms is
69
problematic because the students are already immersed within the norms of their own discipline. They are unable to free themselves of the roles of students within a formal
learning context to fully become investigators within a scientific context. This is a conceit of the classroom, their disciplinary norm can require them to role-play using the norms of other disciplines but it does not allow them to completely immerse themselves in these. The
teacher’s role is to hold students accountable to their own disciplinary norm, that of learner in the classroom. This role can encompass a degree of adoption of the norms of other disciplines but it can never be substituted by them.