Learning communities and teacher monitoring

See also, perhaps,

Illich's (1970) book Deschooling society argued for an education system without teachers: learners would find others with (for the moment) the same learning objective, and learn with them: a system wholly peer, not teacher, based. Cardinal Newman (1852) too has some remarks about how peers are more important than "exams and professors" for true education, though he thought academics who cared about tutoring would be even better. They didn't use the phrase "learning community", but represent the idea that learning is, or should be, fundamentally about peers learning together. [This is arguably the most natural, and deepest, use of the term: not a community with some learning round its edges, but a community formed entirely for the purpose of learning.]

Another meaning of "learning community" in the current educational literature is small groups of HE teachers meeting, say, once a month for reciprocal discussion about each other's personal research projects on teaching. These aren't about normal students' learning. They should perhaps be called "teaching community" rather than "learning community" (Macdonald,I.; 2001), or again "Disciplinary Commons". On the other hand, they are about peer learning, and how peers stimulate personal reflection, and share good practice: clearly good for promoting professionalism.

Newman also emphasises the importance of academics forming a cross-discipline community (again without using that word; today we over-use "collegiality" to express the thought): the importance of respecting what others know as a corrective to assuming that anyone who thinks differently from us is wrong and is stupid to be wrong. Thus he thinks fundamental to a university is that it includes scholars of ALL types of knowledge together in order that this fundamental feature of peer interaction is provided for the academics themselves.

Jean Lave developed the concept of "communities of practice", conceived of as the locus of learning analogous to apprenticeship: the communities here are defined by "practice" or activity, with learning occurring by joining in the activity of more experienced practitioners. This seems at bottom, although from a very different disciplinary starting point, essentially the same general view as that of Vygotsky, in that learning is seen as essentially social, but as essentially not between peers but between more and less knowledgeable people, e.g. teacher and pupil. One of the relatively rare cases of applying that in HE for/to students is described in Dunlap,J.C. "The effect of a problem-centered enculturating experience on doctoral students' self-efficacy" The interdisciplinary journal of problem-based learning vol.1 no.2 pp.19-48. It is a good fit there, since this was a course for turning graduates into researchers, able to participate in that community.

Social constructivism (Gergen, 1985) also sees learning as bound to communities. However many quite different ways in which one person may influence another's learning for the better have already been identified. A general belief that communities matter to learning doesn't say which of these ways do not matter and which do matter, and how, and why; and so is little help for the practical business of improving teaching and learning. The next section explores this variety of ways.

Tinto's concept of integration, subdivided into social and academic integration, seems closely related in spirit, if not in terminology, implying that whether a student stays or drops out depends upon whether they feel part of the community in a university.

The diverse ways other people can help individuals learn

One area of answer is the role of peers individually. Another may be the role of a cohort or group. Another is what teachers can usefully do.

A generic and abstract meaning of "community" is to refer to the way learning is often, perhaps always, promoted by interaction with other people around learning. That is, the social aspects as opposed to the individualistic cognitive aspects of learning. It's mysterious as a whole because, as constructivism rightly emphasises, there is an important sense in which learning is essentially private, something each learner does internally for themselves, and that no-one else can directly do for them. On the other hand, it seems clear that teachers have an enormous effect on learning: children who stay away from school seldom learn much unless their parents devote themselves to teaching them. So the general question is, what is it that people do for learners that makes a big difference?

Another important issue here is how intentionally cooperative these ways of helping are. In any community, in many ways the members are indifferent to each other, in some ways they are in conflict or competition, but in some other ways they are importantly inter-dependent. Learning is certainly like that too. Learning is at bottom a private affair internal to the learner's mind, that no-one else can possibly do for the learner: it is NOT like building a house where labour can be divided. However other people can make a big difference, although whether they intend to varies. When two students revise together by taking turns in devising test questions that the other must try to answer, they put in equal work and end up learning similar content. When two people discuss a concept, they certainly put in similar time and effort, but the research evidence shows they typically take away rather different understandings even though both benefit a lot. This means the previously more advanced learner learns from the process even though the other "had" nothing to teach them. When you look up an entry in Wikipedia or see how much work another student has done or which books they have taken out of the library, you benefit even though they didn't intend that you personally would benefit, nor have you in any way helped them. But we can say that you have benefitted from community.

The important functions can be categorised in 3 ways by whether they are provided intentionally or not, whether the provider has a personal relationship with the learner or not, whether the interaction has approximately equal learning benefits for both or not. These 3 binary categories in reality have intermediate or mixed instances as well, but the main point here is to illustrate how extensively other people may be important to learning even though unintentionally, with no special expertise, or no special relationship with the learner. (Below, "+" marks a fourth binary categorisation: As with all learning activities, it is possible to find cases where the learner is passive in allowing the activity to be provided for them, and other cases where the learner is proactive, taking the initiative in organising or arranging for the activity. A fifth binary categorisation, illustrated but not systematically developed here, is between the basic content level of concepts to be learned, and the management level of deciding on what learning activiites to perform.)

1. Telling (intentional transmission). Since the invention of writing there has been no need for copresence nor for any personal relationship between teacher and learner for this function. [unequal, intentional, no personal relationship 101]
2. Scaffolding of procedural skills (Woods et al., 1978). This does require an expert-novice pairing, the intention to help on the part of the expert, "contingent" behaviour by the expert i.e. they have to pay attention to the learner not follow a fixed script, and so have a personal relationship. [unequal, intentional, a personal relationship 100]
3. Teacher monitoring (see below). [unequal, intentional, personal relationship 100]
4. Alternating roles (create a question, make an answer, ...). This is about either alternating roles in learning tasks that require two people, or about division of labour e.g. a team of detectives, or dividing up reading and doing reciprocal briefing in an HE study group. [equal, intentional, personal relationship 000]
5. Challenge: having your ideas challenged makes you improve them. This is often done in pairs and seems personal, and like sharing. However detailed work by Howe and others shows that in these interactions ideas are mostly not transmitted, but rather learning happens later, the crucial thing being the sense of an unresolved problem lodged in the learner's mind as the result of the other's challenge. As a learning aid, it is unintentional in the sense that each participant's motivation to discuss is not necessarily to help the other (they may even hate them, but more often are seeking to maintain their own ideas rather than assist another). [equal, not intentional, personal relationship 010]
6. Help with managing the learning and teaching process. Especially in HE, one of the major ways students "use" each other is in checking out ways of studying, and even more, setting themselves levels of effort and attainment. Not without good reason, they do not trust what the staff say they wish students to do as much as they do observations of what their peers are actually doing and achieving. Many reading lists and lists of learning objectives are far beyond what any student could cover in the time available (Snyder, 1971): so a big help in deciding on their own objectives is what other students are doing. Though learners may deliberately help others, much of this can be by lurking on discussions, comparing one's marks to lists or averages, etc. The "reader" benefits, but the other may not be aware their actions and achievements have been seen by others. [(on average) equal, unintentional, no personal relationship 011]
7. [equal, unintentional, not personal 011] Peer reviews, arguing with other wikipedia contributors/editors. Peer reviews for journals etc. are unintentional in that the primary purpose is not to teach the author being reviewed.
8. Wikipedia. This is meant to inform others who are strangers to the contributors, but is assembled from peer (non-expert) contributions and editing. Case studies, published portfolios, autobiographies etc. are also often in this category of sharing experiences rather than dictating expert, authoritative knowledge. [equal, intentional, not personal 001]
9. [equal, intentional, not personal 001+] Students doing reciprocal peer critiquing anonymously or with strangers.
10. [unequal, unintentional, personal relationship 110+] Role model; Spying on someone you know, or just learning from their example without them caring what you pick up.
11. [unequal, unintentional, no personal relationship 111+] Learning by eavesdropping on strangers, snooping on private texts, historical investigations, spying on adults or others. Imitating masters e.g. of skateboarding, becoming Prime Minister, etc. Learning from observing without being noticed.

Learners benefit from others with and without special expertise, intention, or being personally known + indicates an activity initiated by the learner (proactive-ness)
Helper's expertise:	Intention to teach	Personal relationship	Not personal
Unequal, staff	Intended	Teacher monitoring, Scaffolding of procedural skills + Ask a tutor	Lecturing, Writing a textbook, + Asking an expert
	Unintended	Role model (using a teacher as), (+) Imitating or observing someone more knowledgable whom you know	+ Eavesdropping on strangers, Using a celebrity or hero as a role model, + Studying the career of a politician to gain similar success
Equal, peer	Intended	+ Alternating roles e.g. testing each other, student reciprocal critiquing, The same but imposed by staff	Wikipedia, Anonymised versions of student reciprocal critiquing, + Posting a question to a forum
	Unintended	Peer discussion, + Borrowing lecture notes, + Spying on, imitating, or observing a classmate you know	Anonymous peer review, + Comparing your marks or actions to the class norm, + Listening to classmates' questions and comments, + Mutual help with the process e.g. ask where the classroom is.

Teacher monitoring

A report on this is
James Wetz (2006) "Holding children in mind over time" PDF.
There was a Dispatches programme on it: The children left behind broadcast on channel 4 at 8pm, 11 February 2008.

Key questions here for me are:

This function ("monitoring") seems similar to the principle of "time on task" and Gibbs' version of that as a principle of assessment design. Here however it is not about designing the course, but monitoring student execution of the design so as to detect promptly those who are falling away. It rings bells with discussion in HE about addressing first year and retention issues there. It is interesting that the discussion about secondary schools, though using different language, is also about supporting the transition from primary school, about requiring pupils to be more self-managing but catching early those who have difficulty with this and focussing staff support there. In effect this is about scaffolding not the learning of the content, but the increase in self-regulation required: and to progressively withdraw that scaffolding, but "contingently" i.e. only for those pupils who can now manage.

Lorna McEachan suggested to me a parallel with schemes used by employers to reduce staff turnover. In many companies too, most "dropouts" occur within the first few months. These months can be thought of as an induction scheme, whether designed or not. The general aims are the same: to make employees/students feel valued, and to give them feedback. The chief means for this are: have their manager talk to them regularly; give them feedback on how they are doing, fill them in on how they fit into the wider picture at the organisation; spread this over not 1-2 days but 90 days (because no-one takes it all in in one lump before they know what any of it means in practice). I.e. this sense of "learning community" is relevant to dropout / retention. AND it suggests a strong connection between educational dropout and the measures large companies adopt to reduce employee attrition.

Thus what I've called "teacher monitoring" seems to be important, especially in addressing dropout / retention. But what view does it imply about "learning community"?

• It is about community in that the learners talk about whether anyone knows them, notices them; whether they feel part of it.
• It is not about peers but about relationships with teachers/staff.
• It is not about teaching content e.g. tutoring a learner through some difficulty of understanding.
• It is not even about managing content or acquisition: i.e. about whether the learner has "got" some concept, or passed some test.
• It is not properly pastoral in the sense of solving their personal problems, or offering them counselling, although awareness of these things may be part of it. It is about helping them work round any problems so as to remain productively engaged in learning.
• It is about learning activity "management": about whether the learner is engaging in the learning activities. (Attendance being simply the crudest measure related to this.) Students mostly learn to become good at this over their time at university, but are usually not good at it at first. They need, and often know they need, some help with this: some scaffolding. This management issue is what is addressed by Gibbs' principles. Teacher monitoring is one way it is addresssed elsewhere in the education system, and perhaps should be considered in first year in HE.

Practical actions in the spirit of such teacher monitoring have been shown to reduce dropout in HE, and are discussed here.

Being accountable

In summary: Shulman first describes a professional (e.g. doctor, lawyer, school teacher) as needing:

• Knowledge of theory (actions to be theoretically grounded)
• Skills (knowing how to do the actions)
• "Integrity": ability to choose actions on the basis not just of technical knowledge, but also of values, ethics.
• "Judgement": able to function well with large amounts of uncertainty.

Shulman offers only 2 examples of signature pedagogies: law education, and the clinical rounds part of medical training: he is NOT discussing general pedagogic recipes for all disciplines, nor even for most of the teaching in even a single discipline. Signature pedagogies are rare, and even within a discipline, not the sole or chief way of teaching. However he does suggest that perhaps EVS (Electronic Voting Systems or "clickers") are establishing another; and similar arguments would imply that perhaps Just In Time Teaching may also be a candidate.

The characteristics he lists of signature pedagogies are:

• pervasive, routine, habitual. So learners are completely used to what is required in these sessions, and can concentrate on what is being taught and learned. I.e. there are standard rules of enagement for these learning activities NOT novelty in the format.
• Students feel highly visible, accountable, and vulnerable.
• Students feel deeply engaged.
• High affective level in class.

The relevant characteristic here is being accountable. This could be seen as an extension of teacher monitoring: but where the learner is more autonomous, less dependent on a teacher taking special pains to monitor them, more self-monitoring.

This suggests that where learning and teaching not only offer but demand and enforce engagement and participation from the learners, then they may fulfill implicit requirements that lead to improved retention. Feeling highly accountable, then, is the proactive learner counterpart of teacher monitoring.

Emotion, learning and retention

1. Academic life is not essentially about emotion but about the business of learning (even though of course all human life has concomitant emotions, just as life and learning require breathing, a glucose supply for brain cells, etc.). [Ignore emotion: not our business, pathology aside]

2. As the literature on constructive interaction by Howe and others shows, learning is enhanced by peer interaction under the right conditions (see above). This doesn't depend on whether the peers like each other, or agree about anything. And in fact some disagreement is a prerequisite for it to be productive. [Ignore emotion: focus on the conceptual content]

3. [Teacher monitoring] When learner interaction with staff is important, it is about recognition and feeling you belong, not about being supportive in the sense of unconditional approval. [Ignore emotion: focus on the management of learning activities and student effort]

4. When you do address emotions and learning, it is easy to damage learning by being nice indiscriminately: Mueller & Dweck (1998), Ecclestone (2004). It has long been clear that communicating high expectations (Rosenthal & Jacobson; 1968, 1992) is very important for learning outcomes, regardless of whether these are expressed kindly or cruelly. Dweck (2000) however has explored particular, often dysfunctional, ways in which attitudes, emotions and expectations about learning may be linked. Essentially, Dweck shows that if a learner believes academic success depends upon a fixed aptitude, and praise for having high ability tends to implant this attitude, then any failure (low mark) is met by abandoning attempts to learn the topic, rather than by a search for how to do better in it.

   Shulman provides some penetrating commonsense here. Emotions fluctuate: that is what they are for, to signal a felt judgement about our momentary situation relative to our expectations and goals. He describes how an infant may burst into tears at a stranger playing peek a boo one moment, yet a minute later be trying to engage them in the same game again. Stress is not bad, but something we all try to optimise: absence of stress is boring, just as overload (terror) is disabling. A skilled teacher will not be trying to remove stress (expectations of doing better), but will attempt scaffolding: adjusting demands both up and downwards to keep them in the zone of best functioning. [Pay attention to emotion: some learner attitudes and some teacher practices are actively damaging to learning by addressing feelings in the wrong way, while others promote it.]

5. If you do wish to address the emotional responses and feelings of learners, as Cartney & Rouse (2006) do, then this is better seen as personal development: PDP. This requires a different use of groups than academic learning does. This may in its own way improve retention, just as some PDP may. [Focus specifically on emotion and emotional development in relation to education]

Learning regardless of personal relationships

The underlying issue here is what is the relationship of the social and the academic -- of Tinto's (1975) two types of integration thought to be important in reducing dropout -- of personal social relationships and productive learning? A personal relationship is founded on knowing specific things about the other, and most importantly, the history of the interactions. If you act identically with a person, regardless of anything they do or say, it cannot be a personal relationship. This is "contingency": the dependence of one party's action on the other's previous action(s). This has also been shown to be important in some teaching: Wood, Wood, & Middleton (1978) showed that optimal tutoring on a procedural task was "contingent tutoring", where the tutor's next intervention was varied depending on the last action by the learner. However this isn't the only (nor the most common) way in which one person can help another's learning; and furthermore, their strategy doesn't depend on prior knowledge of the learner, but on responding to what they are doing currently.

Reasons to doubt that the social precedes the academic

This should be no surprise since the social psychology literature on group functioning has long established that the causality predominantly goes in the contrary direction. Not only is social attractiveness (the bond between group members) independent of personal attractiveness (the bond between two individuals outside any group context), but the need to collaborate on a task creates group cohesiveness even when this means reversing strong prior hostility, as Sherif's experiments and theory of Realistic Conflict established. (See for example the textbook by Hogg & Vaughan, 2008.) This implies that the best way to get a group of learners to bond is to give them a joint task. In other words for learning, the academic precedes the social. This makes sense of quite common student complaints about ice-breaker activities as wasting their time (after all, students' purpose is to learn, not to pay universities to help them with their social life), and more importantly of Trotter's (2006) study of two courses with contrasting dropout rates. One course provided a social activity at the start and had a high dropout rate; the other did not, but did start the course with group projects (which gave the students a directly relevant activity while "incidentally" interacting with each other) and had a low dropout rate.

It seems likely, then, that a more careful consideration of the literatures relevant to learning and community could yield better suggestions about supporting academically productive peer interaction. Certainly Baxter (2007) obtained impressive learning gains based on online "virtual" student groups where there was no provision for meeting face to face nor for prior small group social interaction, but had repeated joint group projects which led to considerable and useful peer interaction.

In fact there is a perverse pressure in the (e-learning) literature not to report successful practice that doesn't need special measures, ice breakers etc. If you invent a procedure to solve a problem of getting students to interact, then it's easy to publish. If they interact anyway then it isn't published: in effect, only the rescues of failed learning designs are published. In our department, for the first 2 years or so there was little student interaction on the VLE, but now there is: but no staff member has done anything to make that happen by "e-moderating" etc.

Furthermore, the literature on conceptual learning through peer interaction shows that there is no special need for prior social bonds, but on the contrary there is a need to arrange for both a difference in opinion and public statements of that difference to counteract the tendency for groups to agree verbally regardless of their actual private opinions (Howe, Tolmie, & Rogers, 1992). Here the social need not precede the academic, and even tends to obstruct it. This may be why so often student study groups assembled on a basis of prior friendship seem to be less productive than those formed for strictly academic purposes.

Practical advice

1. If I have to facilitate discussions, this it is a poor learning design. Change the design so the students are doing a joint task in which collaboration and so communication are built in.
2. If I still have to facilitate discussions, then the real function is not to break the ice but to establish the "tone" for the discussion:
   • topic: what it is appropriate to talk about
   • So each person feels allowed to speak.
     Build a "history" between the people: it needn't be personal in the sense of non-work content, but is a history of exchanges between just those 2 people.
   • "Safety": so it feels tht is is safe for me in particular to speak about this topic in particular. (Generalities about safe spaces etc. are probably rubbish: whether I feel safe to speak shifts in a second depending on the topic, who is in the room at that moment etc.)
3. If I still have do introductions, then at least make the content of ice breakers relevant to the academic task to hand.

Recap

More generally, besides reconsidering our teaching practices to take community more seriously, perhaps the most important attribute for a graduate to acquire is a realisation that our learning can be enhanced by people that we don't know or even that we don't like: that the social and the academic are not bound together in any simple way, and that the lifelong learner is not dependent on personal relationships. This readies a graduate both for workplace group working and for learning with peers through the realisation that both parties benefit and no altruism or loyalty is required (although it is often engendered).

"Community" again

• Learning is better promoted (more learning outcomes are realised) if pre-existing communities support it: families, cultural attitudes, governments.
• Other people help learners in many ways, not all personal, not all intentional. A learner without access to other people would be handicapped, although not entirely prevented from learning. Thus there are some other positive community effects on learning, even without supportive attitudes.
• Groups ("communities") specially formed for learning are also important, although not essential. Learning in a group (others doing the same course), inside an organisation like a university, increases the availability of resources including social resources, that promote your personal learning.
• Knowledge itself is socially distributed, and not individually and independently grounded. This social network could be called a community, though of a different kind. If we consider a topic as simple as what does something weigh, then what we want to mean is whatever the government standard of weight is; which in turn depends on international standards, and in turn these are under review by experts who are seeking to replace the standard kilogram lump of metal by another way of defining the standard. Or something like what "learning community" means: this web page represents a more sophisticated understanding than I had before writing it (though probably less than the understanding of a greater expert in the literature): but it also illustrates how meaning is a series of pointers to other meanings, not something anyone "owns" or "has". When we teach something, we are connecting our learners better to a community of users of the terms (Putnam; 1975).
• But possibly the most powerful effects of community on learning are not at this "object level" of what is meant or known; but at the "meta level" or "management level" of how learning activities are regulated. Learning in a group, to a common timescale, is widely felt to be important, even necessary. It is notable that the Open University, in other respects offering the most freedom to the learner to choose the time and place of the learning work they do, nevertheless imposes deadlines and timescales that keep sometimes gigantic cohorts of students in synchrony.

Summary / conclusion

This applies also to Tinto's notion of "integration": both "community" and "integration" allude to a feeling of belonging, and to a relationship between social and academic aspects; but both in fact have many different and in some cases opposing interpretations.

The idea and practice I called "teacher monitoring" raises the point that the aspects of community that have a positive effect on learning may not be about being kind. Just as real communities are by no means uniformly benign, and perhaps could never be if they are to maintain cohesion and discipline, so learning communities are not entertainment services, whose only purpose is to give pleasure and comfort. The ways in which learners are aided by other people are extremely diverse, and so too may be the ways that promote student retention.

"If you travel with us you will have to learn things you do not want to learn in ways you do not want to learn".
[from a letter by Doris Lessing, replying to a reader who had been seriously disturbed by reading one of her novels. Quoted in Alan Yentob's "Imagine" TV programme on Doris Lessing, broadcast Tues 27 May 2008, 10:35pm on BBC1 ]

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Web site logical path: [www.psy.gla.ac.uk] [~steve] [localed] [dropout] [rival ideas on dropout] [this page]
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