Chapter 15 page 390
reasoning level. In contrast, when the teacher joined the groups, only 32% of the student turns were at a
high reasoning level. On the other hand, students did make some gains in the understanding of chemistry
content when the teachers met with them (see also Meloth, 1991). Moreover, Meloth and Deering (1999)
found no evidence that teacher interventions with groups lowered the quality of group talk.
Given the mixed evidence, a compromise between the two perspectives may be the best bet. When
student groups are working, teachers should offer guidance only if and when the group needs help, but such
intervention should be offered in moderation. Researchers recommend that teachers do the following:
Allow groups to try to work through conceptual difficulties if they can; if they flounder too long,
provide help.
Be sure to listen to student groups long enough to identify what the problems are before intervening.
Teachers sometimes intervene before they have listened sufficiently to understand what the issues
are and in such cases, their help is unlikely to be useful (Meloth & Deering, 1999).
If you help, you should get to the point quickly and efficiently and then allow the group to continue
working on their own. (Meloth & Deering, 1999)
In this section, we have examined how teachers should respond to groups as they are engaged in
collaborative learning tasks. In the next section, we address another important issue in forming effective
collaborative groups: the appropriate group size and composition.
Problem 15.14. Evaluating Teaching. Teacher participation.A. This is a dialogue from a Group Investigation by tenth graders investigating “What
makes a poem a poem?”
Aviva: Here’s the room where he sat...he had a special room for writing...and look
at those beautiful hills...it says that he loved to go on long walks...
Anat: Can you understand his poems? They’re so long!
Aviva: Well, I guess I really don’t understand them, and I didn’t really read them,
but there’s one poem that I read and could make out, about the daffodils
he sees on his walks. You want to hear it? [She reads the poem aloud.]
John: So, can we say that poets write about what they see around them?
Mike: At least we know that Wordsworth did. What about Langston Hughes?
Doesn’t seem like he was influenced by nature.
Anat: But he wrote about the kind of people he saw around him.
Teacher: Well, you see, each of those poets lived in such a different environment,
and it seems to me that their poems tell you a lot about how they lived.
John: Then any society can have a poet.
Teacher: That’s right! And all societies do have poets.... (Adapted from Y. Sharan
& Sharan, 1992, p. 119)
Assume that the teacher listened to the same segment of discussion that you just read.
Should the teacher have intervened when she did? Given that she did intervene, did she
provide scaffolding at an appropriate level?Response: On one hand, the students seem to come very close to articulating the
generalization that the teacher makes in her first turn. They are considering different
examples of what poets write about, and if the teacher had left them alone, they might
well have come up with the idea that poets write about their own environments. If the
teacher felt she needed to provide some scaffolding, she might have given a much lower
level of hint, such as asking, “What do examples like these tell you about what poets
write about?” Then the students could have generated the idea on their own on the basis