Dr Robyn Gillies’ studies of small-group learning in school classrooms could bring new twists to an old technique.
Her research suggests it has huge potential for teaching academic and interpersonal skills such as problem-solving, communication and conflict resolution.
Ways to exploit this potential could include grouping students with varying abilities, encouraging good student-teacher communication and setting tasks which can’t be completed unless every member of the group participates.
Dr Gillies, a senior lecturer in the University’s School of Education, specialises in school guidance and counselling, cooperative group learning and children’s behaviour in school.
Her $70,000 UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award will fund the next stage of research which has already attracted more than $320,000 in three Australian Research Council grants since 1995.
Dr Gillies worked with more than 1500 children and teachers from more than 50 schools, monitoring and analysing small-group dynamics to show the potential benefits of small-group learning.
Now she is teaching teachers how to incorporate cooperative learning strategies in their curricula. She has run inservice workshops for more than 40 teachers from four secondary schools in Brisbane.
The next stage will be to see whether or not this training promotes friendly and open teacher-student interactions and the effect this has on students’ communication skills, prosocial behaviours and learning.
Her research so far has been limited to monitoring students as they interact in small groups, she says. Now she wants to capture the wider class context – particularly the language teachers and students use to communicate with each other.
Dr Gillies’ work suggests that a teacher does better as the “guide on the side”, not the “sage on the stage”. And overall, she hopes, her research will help teachers and students make the most of the classroom experience while encouraging life-long learning.
“I’ve found that teachers working in cooperative learning environments tend to use language which is demonstrative, intimate, encouraging and helpful,” Dr Gillies said, “and their students seem to see them as supportive, friendly, tolerant, competent and motivating.
“This is in contrast to traditional classrooms where teachers’ language is sometimes seen as authoritarian, rigid and critical, and the teachers themselves as distant and impersonal.”
Dr Gillies was a guidance officer for Education Queensland during the mid 1980s when a “conversion on the road to Damascus” awakened her interest in cooperative learning.
“I was visiting a primary school which accommodated students with special needs and I saw an absolutely inspiring example of structured positive independence,” she said.
“The teachers were fantastic. They had split the class into small, carefully-structured groups of varying abilities and each group had a task which couldn’t be completed unless everyone participated. The kids all helped each other and the result was total interaction and inclusiveness.”
Dr Gillies started a part-time PhD in education in 1989. In 1991 she won an Education Queensland fellowship to study full-time and began tutoring, and she has worked with the School of Education’s Fred and Eleanor Schonell Special Education ever since.
