Implementing Small‐Group Instruction: Insights from Successful Practitioners

Abstract

As we talked with faculty members around the country who are enlivening their classes with small-group work, they described their approaches with enthusiasm and confidence. Yet faculty members who are skeptical about these approaches, and even those tentatively interested in trying them, still raise important concerns about both the philosophy and the actual strategies of undertaking group work. "It really can't be that easy, can it?" they ask, quite rightfully.A frequent concern that surfaces in many discussions about smallgroup learning has to do with the assumption that if you are in favor of it, you are de facto opposed to the lecture in any form. This presumption of the new truth is hardly the attitude that will bring about the kind of institutional change that we are hoping for in the coming years. All the teachers we interviewed believe deeply in small-group learning but also spend a significant amount of time lecturing, leading whole-class discussions, and engaging in other kinds of teaching approaches. This is our practice as well. Lecture and small-group work must be framed as both/and endeavors, not either/or ones; yet somehow the message is too often sent that to be in favor of small-group learning is to be completely anti-lecture.In this chapter we will address a number of concerns about using small-group work that have emerged in the professional literature and that we have encountered as we discussed this approach with colleagues. We will address these concerns based in part on our reading of the literature, but NEW DIRECTIONS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING, no. 81, Spring 2000 © Jossey-Bass Publishers 63 5 64 STRATEGIES FOR ENERGIZING LARGE CLASSES more particularly on the experiences of the practitioners whose approaches are featured in this volume. Reduced Content CoverageAren't you sacrificing content coverage? Class time spent doing group work is certainly time taken from lecturing.This question comes up most often in discussions about the value of the time spent in groups in class. It speaks to a central issue that has served as a flash point in higher-education circles as articulated by Barr and Tagg in their influential article in Change magazine (1995), which called for moving from a teaching to a learning paradigm. We agree with Barr and Tagg that it is more productive to think about the teaching/learning process from the perspective of the gains learners make over the duration of a class rather than from the perspective of what we teachers cover. If cognitive and affective student gains are the measures of success for teachers, then both anecdotal and research evidence appear to lean strongly to using significant amounts of group work, rather than lecturing alone, as we have outlined in Chapter One and will further detail in Chapter Six.The faculty members we interviewed expressed consistent satisfaction that students in their classes are demonstrating one or more of these indicators of increased learning: much greater conceptual understanding, more complex critical-thinking skills, better cl...

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