A lesson at the Association for Science Education

Ben and I presented our first joint session to Science teachers at the ASE conference in Birmingham yesterday; in spite of very positive feedback, it was a lesson that taught us something.

First of all, I’ve always run my CPD with delegates playing the role of their own pupils. One reason is because Cooperative Learning cannot be grasped as a theory – it is in every way a practical, immersive experience. Another reason is that trying it first hand creates empathy with your pupils and insight into the unique challenges they face when learning together in such a structured fashion.

However, in yesterday’s session, we found that presenting  a reading skills lesson to highly skilled readers quickly becomes as convoluted as it sounds.

Reading a paragraph out and then having your partner summarising or commenting on it works extremely well from KS4-10. But, to most secondary science teachers, all motivated and highly skilled readers, reading alone and in their own tempo is far more effective –  as opposed to children and young adults who can read alone for half an hour and then have no clue what the text was about.

As Ben commented from his experience, this lesson is actually far more effective to students. Also far quicker, as youngsters do not delve into each nook and corner as intelligent, professional adults in a paid session tend to do. In the ten minutes they had, many pairs only managed to go through one or two of a 6 page extract from On transfer as the goal in literacy by Wiggins.

You know you are working with science teachers when a delegate turns around to you and says “This text is as dense as tungsten.”

One major mistake on our behalf was to pick this text on research into … well, reading strategies. Suddenly, content and objective became inextricably garbled.

We chose it because we wanted to present something where all attendees were on an equal footing, but using a text on quantum computing or somesuch from Scientific American would have been a lot better.

To give an example, the opening Catch1Partner with vocabulary from the text came across precisely not as vocabulary from the text, but as general introduction to reading skills. “reciprocal learning” and “prior knowledge” should have been replaced with “quants” and “nano” had we only gone with Scientific American.

(More on rote learning with Catch1Partner here. Just skip past the discussion of Mr Peal’s book).

We are aiming to upload materials for the benefit of delegates over the next few days. In the meantime: I discussed introvert learners with some of you. The article I mentioned was Inside out? collaborating introverts.

Our introduction mentioned Cooperative Learning in relation to the Sutton Trust. For anyone considering presenting this method to school budget-controllers, this is a must read: EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit; a Cooperative Learning gloss.

I am aiming to get an article up on cooperativelearning.works on how Feedback, another Sutton Trust/EEF best practice, integrates with Cooperative Learning.

Stay updated on twitter.