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Blending Collaborative Learning and Learning Strategies to Enhance Online Engagement

Expand your teaching toolkit for both online and face-to-face courses

In my last entry, I explained how principles of facilitating peer-assisted learning (PAL) groups in the Learning Commons can support our own thinking as we design courses and learning plans. This blog entry is a continuation of this discussion. In the Learning Commons, designing PAL groups goes beyond the basic structure and facilitation strategies that I outlined last time. Collaborative learning techniques (CLTs) and learning strategies to two other essential components that our PAL facilitators weave into their group sessions with students in NRS 325, MTH 141, and PHY 204. As you read this blog entry, imagine how you might incorporate CLTs and learning strategies into your own online (and, eventually, face-to-face) sessions with students.

Collaborative Learning Techniques (CLTs)

Peer-assisted learning (PAL) is a derivation of Supplemental Instruction (SI), and the collaborative learning techniques that I outline below are from the standard SI training. Here’s the list that we use in our training of UP’s PAL facilitators

  • Group Discussion is what it sounds like. We all use this, but the following strategies provide alternatives to this tried and true CLT.
  • Clusters are breakout groups that many of you are already using in Zoom or Teams. In the pre-pandemic days, we used clusters for group work in classrooms.
  • Turn to a Partner is a CLT what many have long used in face-to-face instruction. Students turn to a partner to work on a task. In our remote context, we can just have pairs of students work in breakout rooms.
  • Think / Pair / Share is different that Turn to a Partner in that we allow time for individual students to process material or work on a task alone. With Zoom, we can send students to individual rooms before bringing them back and putting them in pair breakout rooms. While this has extra moving parts, the solo rooms do allow students to think alone first, where as they may be tempted just to start talking with a partner if we just put them in pairs and ask them to think alone first and then talk.
  • Individual Presentation involves groups in which the individual members present something to the group in a round-robin fashion. In our PAL sessions, we use this rarely since it can become a one-way reporting out. To be more effective, the students need to know to take notes, ask questions, and provide feedback to individual presenters.
  • Assigned Discussion Leader works best when the breakout group members are far along in their learning so that they can discuss in depth. The discussion leader will also benefit from having time to prepare, say overnight or between class sessions. Also, having some community norms around discussion in groups can invigorate the group discussions.
  • Jigsaw is a classic group learning activity in which a topic or problem is divided into parts. The class is divided into groups to work on their assigned parts. Then they come back together to share their parts of the whole. This then can spark questions and further discussion.
  • Group Survey can be used to gather students’ positions, opinions, prior knowledge, or predictions. As faculty, we can use polling platforms like MS Forms or Poll Everywhere (both available to UP faculty). After polls are taken, other CLTs can be used to engage students in group work around the responses. Group Survey can also be used as an opener to see where students stand vis-à-vis the topic of the day or to close a class meeting to assess how their thinking is changing.

In our PAL facilitator trainings and debriefings, we encourage our peer PAL facilitators to explore each of the above CLTs and not to rely on just one or two. The most popular are Group Discussion and Clusters, but all can be used to advance student learning.

Collaborative learning techniques provide us instructors with structures for student engagement. They provide students with spaces for peer interaction. Given the results of the recent survey of UP students, we know that many want more interaction in their remote classes. By adding the above CLTs to your teaching toolkits, you will likely be able to facilitate that peer interaction around that material that you want students to learn durably.

Learning Strategies

While CLTs provide a format for social learning, learning strategies provide structured processes for learning. For our PAL facilitators, knowledge of these strategies helps them to plan their sessions efficiently. They have a grab bag of strategies to try out in any session. As they explore these learning strategies by using them, they become more aware of how and when to use them.

From the learner’s perspective, learning strategies are behaviors and actions one takes to learn more effectively; they can support motivation and completion. From our perspective as instructors, learning strategies are activities that support learning, social interaction, and involvement with difficult material. For example:

  • Matrices have become popular among many in this era of remote teaching and learning, especially since we can use collaborative document tools like Google Docs, and we can effectively use matrices with the ClustersCLT. In breakout groups, the students work together to fill out part of a table or matrix in a shared Google Doc. The work to do this involves discussion, recall, revisiting and comparing notes, and asking questions. Different clusters (breakout groups) can work on different parts of the matrix which can be part of a jigsaw approach, or they can work developing their own responses to the same matrix which will then allow you to have them compare their responses.
Example of the matrices learning strategy used in a Group Discussion CLT
Example of the matrices learning strategy used in a Group Discussion CLT during a study strategies workshop in November 2020
  • Verbal Volleyball can be played in a whole group and works best after students have gained some familiarity with the concepts. The instructor asks a student to explain a concept, idea, or issue covered in class and then to give another student a different concept, idea, or issue which that student will then explain. The process goes on until the students can go no further. Repeats are not allowed. As the instructor, you can then pose questions and request students to use their resources to revisit concepts needing further work. Verbal Volleyball makes for a good opener or closer to online class sessions, but keep in mind that the students need some familiarity with the material.

The Learning Commons’ PAL facilitators have dozens of learning strategies at their disposal, and we keep adding more as we find or create them. We also use an app called SI Cards and Session Planner that offers a wide array of learning strategies for SI and PAL sessions.

The shift to remote teaching and learning has given us the opportunity to revisit how we support student learning, as we have done with the PAL facilitation program in the Learning Commons. As you consider lesson planning for the rest of the semester and plans for the spring, collaborative learning techniques and learning strategies can be part of your instructor’s toolkit for student success. If you would like to discuss any of the topics and approaches of my last two blog entries, please do feel free to contact me at white@up.edu, give me a ring on MS Teams, or leave a reply at the bottom of this blog entry.

Jeffrey White directs the Learning Commons at UP, where he collaborates with others to supervise and support over 60 tutors, writing assistants, and PAL facilitators. He also teaches courses in the Department of International Languages and Cultures.

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Lesson Planning: At the Intersection of Bloom’s Taxonomy and Knowledge Dimensions

Revisiting Bloom’s Taxonomy

In the 1950’s Benjamin Bloom and other researchers collaborated to create what is known as Bloom’s Taxonomy of cognitive processes. This has been revised over the years and includes today six cognitive dimensions:

  • Remember: recall facts and basic concepts (e.g., define, list, state)
  • Understand: explain ideas or concepts (e.g., describe, explain, summarize)
  • Apply: use information in new situations (e.g., solve, complete, change)
  • Analyze: draw connections among ideas (e.g., contrast, categorize, connect)
  • Evaluate: justify a stand or decision (e.g., criticize, defend, prioritize)
  • Create: produce new or original work (e.g., design, modify, write)

The accompanying verbs can be used to develop and organize learning goals and objectives for our curricula, courses, and daily lesson plans. Many UP faculty already use Bloom’s Taxonomy as a guide for planning, but we can enhance the use of Bloom’s Taxonomy by considering our objectives through the lens of knowledge dimensions that Anderson and Krathwohl added to the taxonomy in 2001. The four dimensions are:

  • Factual knowledge (basic elements to learn in the discipline)
  • Conceptual knowledge (interrelationships between basic elements within a larger context)
  • Procedural knowledge (methods in the discipline)
  • Metacognitive knowledge (awareness of how learning work in relation to one’s self)

Anderson and Krathwohl developed a matrix for combining cognitive processes and knowledge dimensions that can be adapted when planning courses and lessons. As faculty, we can adapt this matrix in our own lesson planning. Here’s an example from a 300-level applied linguistics course that I teach in the Department of International Languages and Cultures.

Basic concept: Individual differences in language learning

Knowledge Dimension: Factual knowledge

Bloom’s Taxonomy Cognitive Process: Remember (Related actions verbs: define, list, state, recall, identify)

Learning Goal: Students can accurately define individual differences and list examples.Writing assistance working with student

Assessment: Students take a low-stakes quiz in which they define individual differences and provide examples they recall from the reading and group work activity.

Learning Experiences: 

  1. Students read section on individual differences in How Languages are Learned respond to reading prompts before class.
  2. In class, students work in groups to identify individual differences in written profiles of learners and present their findings.

Intersecting with multiple knowledge dimensions

As faculty, we can also run concepts and theories we teach through both multiple knowledge and cognitive process dimensions as we plan instruction. Let’s take, for example, the social cultural theoretical perspective of second language acquisition from the same applied linguistics course

Factual dimension / Remember

Instructor provides learning experiences so that students practice recalling definitions of terms and characteristics and elements of the theory.

Conceptual dimension / Understand

Students participate in learning experiences that guide them to start explaining principles and models of the social cultural perspective. It’s important to note that at this level, the students are not just restating an author’s or instructor’s explanation; that would be remembering. Rather, they are using concepts, terms, and paraphrasing to explain the concept or theory.

Procedural dimension / Analyze

Eventually, students point out passages in a research text that indicate the linguistics researcher is writing from the social cultural perspective of second language learning. They are using their knowledge of the theory as an analytical tool.

Metacognitive dimension / Apply

Finally, the instructor can work with students to develop and apply motivational and language learning strategies that are based on a social cultural perspective of second language learning.

The above processes can also be reorganized into a class lesson planning tool.

Application in your teaching

The combination of Bloom’s Taxonomy and knowledge dimensions create a powerful approach for your faculty toolbox in support of our efforts to provide the excellent undergraduate education opportunities to our students. For more about deploying Bloom’s Taxonomy and the four dimensions of knowledge, check out Laurie Richlin’s Blueprint for Learning: Construction College Courses to Facilitate, Assess, and Document Learning (2006), one of the sources of today’s TLC blog entry. If you would like to explore in more detail using dimensions and Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs in a lesson planning form, download this MS Word version.

Jeffrey White directs the Learning Commons in the Shepard Academic Resource Center in Buckley Center 163, where he trains tutors to reach Level 1 of the International Tutor Training Program Certification. He also teaches German, an applied linguistics course, and a preparation course for study abroad in the Department of International Languages and Cultures. Jeffrey is currently the president-elect of the Northwest College Reading and Learning Association. He is happy to meet over coffee or lunch to discuss course and lesson design, training, and teaching in higher education and can be reached at white@up.edu.

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Sticky Skills

Recently, UP’s College of Arts & Sciences held its annual book-club reading of a work on pedagogy. This year’s title was Make it Stick: the Science of Successful Learning (P. Brown/H. Roediger/M. McDaniel, 2014), and Jeffrey White led faculty in a discussion.

If you were among the participants, did the book’s methods “to learn better and remember longer” actually stick?

Whether you are new to the book or not, here’s a quick overview of a few of its lessons for the classroom.

Make it Stick was published the same year (2014) as Benedict Carey’s How We Learn. It contains similarly counterintuitive lessons that were derived from research in the cognitive psychology of learning (my two-page overview of that book can be found here).

The book’s epigraph comes from Aeschylus: “Memory is the mother of all wisdom.” Make it Stick insists that human learning primarily originates not through new information but through remembering what you have already encountered. (For so often, it takes this kind of reflection to recognize – often for the first time – the value your experiences hold.)

The authors point to data showing how our classic learning strategies of cramming, underlining, highlighting, and repetition simply do not have long-term value for remembering.

They would have us replace these ineffective methods with tools that actually work: ones that are more effective in disrupting the natural process of forgetting. So, for our purposes of teaching at UP here are six challenges drawn from the book:

How might you integrate “interleaving” into your curriculum? As the book explains interleaving involves practicing different topics or skills in a series – rather than focusing long and hard on just one. Learning at different times, in different spaces, and with different subjects helps multiply “retrieval cues,” fostering better access to our memories.

How might you integrate forgetting into your curriculum? Students should remember to forget in order to exercise the muscles of retrieval. Make it Stick suggests we honor the fact that “learning is an iterative process that requires you to revisit what you have learned earlier and continually update it and connect it with new knowledge” (21-2). While “the amount of study time is no measure of mastery” (10), a more dependable criterion for mastery involves the number of times you forget and then remember a topic or skill. Time and interleaving can foster the crucial practice of forgetting. (They suggest, for example, deliberately employing days between classes to forget, so that we then start our classes by having students try to remember what was covered in the last meeting.)

How might you add more quizzes to your course? The book champions an increased number of low-stakes quizzes across the semester, to help foster the practice of self-quizzing. This simple activity gives students a more accurate understanding of how much they know and don’t know (for overconfidence in what one knows is all too common). And it helps interrupt forgetting.

How might you integrate the habit of “writing to learn” into your course? A regular habit of low-stakes, informal writing in your class (journal entries, freewrites, targeted reflections) provides cognitive variety in a lecture-based class, and fosters personal connections necessary to unite students with new concepts. By thinking on paper, students are practicing “retrieval, elaboration, and generation” – internal activities that no lecture can provide.

How might you integrate the “concrete and personal” into your curriculum? We remember things best when they matter to us. Make it Stick urges that instructors not be shy about weaving personal anecdotes into the content of their lessons: “Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal” (11). While it might seem self-indulgent to bring yourself into the picture, serving as a model to students of how to integrate a subject into our everyday lives helps clarify the stakes involved.

How might you make learning more difficult in your class? This wildly counterintuitive strategy suggests we stop streamlining our curriculum for ease – for the best, most long-lasting learning happens when the learning is hard. Students do better when we give them the room to struggle with difficulty. Forms of such “desirable difficulty” include adding to your class more puzzles, problems, and riddles than you currently do: “It’s better to solve a problem than to memorize a solution” (88). So if we truly want to learn (and remember) a concept, we should turn off that pleasurable TED talk, and reach instead for the textbook.

(In other words, stop reading featherweight, short-form reviews like this one, and crack open Make it Stick!)

-Lars Erik Larson, UP English Dept, 2018

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Providing the opportunity to forget…and remember

a close up of an elephants faceOver this past summer, a couple books that focus on the role of recall in learning came to my attention. Make it stick (Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel (2014)) and Small Teaching by James Lang (2016) both claim that retrieval practice is essential for durable learning. The authors argue that practicing recall builds strong connections in the brain that lead to long-term retention, and they cite numerous studies to support their claims. Our students can often struggle with recalling material from their readings, our lectures, and classroom discussions, but we can take steps to promote recall by making small changes to our teaching. For example, we can open class sessions by asking students to remind everyone what we did in the last session or last week. Having students do this in pairs or small groups and then report out may help to them to overcome some inhibitions or recalling in a whole-group discussion. When introducing something new, Lang suggests having students retrieve previous related material or concepts that lead up to it. By providing students the opportunity to recall at the beginning of class, we help to prime the pump for learning and better participation. These are just a couple of the many suggestions and examples of how we can support our students’ learning and improve our approaches to teaching in higher education.