Andrew Pollard - How can teachers engage pupils more effectively in group-work?

How can teachers engage pupils more effectively in group-work?

Research Taster

Training children to manage dialogue effectively in groups can help raise their engagement in learning and their achievement in, for example, reading and mathematics (Key Stage 1) and science (Key Stage 2). Key issues highlighted by the research are the need to develop trust and respect among pupils and teachers and to build pupils’ skills in group-working.

Your evidence

To investigate talk during group-working, you may want to gather data on your own teaching. One good way of doing this is to ask a colleague to observe your lesson. Alternatively, you could make a tape recording of a lesson for later analysis. Questions to address could include:

How much speaking is there?

Who is doing the speaking?

When does the teacher speak?

When do the pupils speak?

Do they know when to speak and when to listen?

What does this say about how far they trust and respect each other and you?

Do they know what to say to support each others’ and their own learning?

Moving forward

You could use your reflections to enhance your approach. Could you encourage greater and more effective pupil participation by:

agreeing explicit rules for discussion with pupils,
providing activities to encourage collaboration,
modeling asking questions that encourage others to explain - such as ‘Why did you think that?’; and
encouraging pupils to explicitly take note of each other’s responses?