Carol Clark on Group Work and Debate

“Collaborative Group Work and Economic Debate”

Carol Clark

INTRODUCTION

As a member of the 2012-13 CTL teaching fellows, I participated in an exchange of ideas on various aspects of teaching and learning embodied in seven different projects across seven different disciplines at the College.  While the goals (and challenges) of each project varied, emphasis on student engagement with the learning process united them all.   Some of the major themes over the nine months included the idea of learning as a “progression” from active reading to discovery, application, and analysis of ideas through student-led activities and writing exercises.  The role and forms that writing might take also figured prominently in the discussions – from informal, free writing; to joint, collaborative writing; to public, web-based writing that invites a wider audience to contribute to the learning process itself.

Working within this broad framework, I explored the question of how best to develop course materials and group activities in an upper level economics course with the goal of encouraging students to 1) engage actively and critically with competing economic theories, and 2) work with empirical data.   At the end of the course, students were asked to write a position paper that focused on a contested area within economics and that required the selection and discussion of one of the two competing theoretical models introduced in class.  The ideas of “contested” and “competing” were critical to the project itself.  As I had learnt from the past, students often do not understand the nature of the contest (or why it may exist) and have little experience in identifying the terrain over which the competition applies.  This non-familiarity (or even discomfort) inhibits learning insofar as it translates into student resistance to engage fully with alternative theoretical views, including a desire to fast-forward to evaluation before examining carefully each view.  These challenges informed my approach to designing the course.

COURSE DESIGN:  SEQUENCING THE COLLABORATIVE LEARNING EXPERIENCE

I organized the course around a collaborative learning approach in which students engaged in group work with little direct intervention from me.  Equally important, the course material itself was broken down into a sequence of steps.

Collaborative learning rests on student-to-student learning and thus shifts student attention away from the instructor and towards sharing ideas with one another, working in groups to reach a consensus, and presenting joint answers for discussion to the broader class.  Through this “constructive conversation” students build knowledge together and gain fluency in the language and models of economics.[1]

The sequencing of the course material relates to one of the principal ideas/themes that the teaching fellows returned to throughout the nine months of meeting:  student learning is a progression of inter-related steps each of which applies skills or ideas that can be transferred to the next step.  The number of steps (or the specific sequencing of those steps) may differ by teacher, discipline, or level of difficulty of course material.  Here briefly are the steps I employed:

• Each section began with active reading exercises designed to help students to isolate the author’s major claims and supporting arguments and evidence.  This lay the foundation for the next three steps.
• Students identified and explained the key assumptions associated with each of the competing schools of thought.  They then considered the historical context within which each school developed its model, namely the “big” questions, or historical problems, on which the school focused.
• Students uncovered the major themes that ran through each set of assumptions.
• Students turned to the empirical record of a specific economic issue.  Exercises were developed to help students to “read” the empirical data and examine the story (the claims and arguments) that each author communicated with the empirical evidence.
• Students were asked to evaluate the persuasiveness of the evidence presented in relation to the claims and arguments put forth by the authors.
• Students were asked to write a final position paper employing what they had learnt in the course.

RISKS INVOLVED IN THE COLLABORATIVE LEARNING APPROACH AND SOLUTIONS TO ADDRESS THOSE RISKS

In the collaborative model, the instructor assumes the role of “a guide at the side” as opposed to the traditional “sage on the stage” and thus risks some loss of oversight.[2]  Students can move off-target in their group work, and some students within a group may not fully participate in the conversation.  To minimize these risks, I designed a series of activities (without intervening directly in the students’ constructive conversations) to increase individual student accountability and responsibility to the group.  Those activities included reading comprehension quizzes and the completion of active reading exercises in advance of group work; and in-class examinations and take-home writing assignments based in part on the results and application of group work.  Lastly, I developed worksheets to guide group discussion and group reporting to the class as a whole.