The Small-Group Learning Advantage

Welcome to the future of Education. Michael Horn here. Really excited about the conversation we're going to have today with Mark Van Risen at Oregon University of Oregon and in the school of education there and his research into the importance of small group learning. I think this is an incredibly important topic coming out of the pandemic right now for learners of all ages, really, but particularly for K12 schools as they think about how to structure the learning time more meaningfully. I think we can learn a lot from Mark's expertise. He's someone I've known since the beginning of my own time in education. He was hotshot faculty member early on in Minnesota with some of the folks at Education Evolving and gave some good feedback on disrupting class and some of the other stuff that we did early on. And so I'll bring him to the stage right now. And Mark, it is great to. It is great to see you. It's early, I guess, where you are, but lunchtime where I am on the East Coast. But the conversation. Let's dive right in. You've been looking at this question of small group learning for a while now. What do we know from the research about its effectiveness and how it compensates compares to other modalities in which learners could be spending their time?

Yeah, there's a couple of things. Number one, small group learning is really good for achievement. It's really good for retention. It's really good for group processing, for deep processing. There's a lot of things that happen in a conversation, a lot of areas of the brain that get used, that don't get used when you're simply listening passively. And all of these things contribute to better academic outcomes. Now, my own work was to take some of those academic and social outcomes. People had found positive social outcomes, but my work was to extend that and look downstream. What are the more positive outcomes that you get when you have a positive academic and social experience in the classroom? So when you structure small groups well, that's usually the outcomes that you get. You can have a positive experience working with your. Your peers while you're also learning something. And so what I found is that going downstream from that, you can have reduced stress, you can have enhanced social emotional skills, you can have improved behavior, reduce bullying, reduce substance use. You can have better mental health outcomes in addition to a lot of the academic gains. The other thing that I've learned is that the basic concepts of how to do this well are not widely understood. And so there is a series of things that you need to build into these lessons to ensure that they are a positive academic and social experience. And not a lot of times that's, that's a lot of times that's not done well. It's, it's, there's pieces that are left out or things that are not done correctly. And we can certainly go into that if there's time. But that's the second takeaway that my research has, has shown me is that there's huge benefits for this when it's done right, but a lot of times it's not.

So let's start with when it's done right and some of those benefits a little bit more. I'm really interested to hear you talk about how the small group learning environments impact both the achievement side of the equation and these, these positives that occur from social experiences more broadly. It's, I think, particularly salient right now because we hear a lot of conversation around the needs to address social, emotional health for students coming back from isolating experiences and all sorts of trauma we may or may not know about during the pandemic. But also because, you know, more recently, Robert Pundisio just wrote this piece for the American Enterprise Institute questioning schools suitability.

In effect to be able to get.

Into some of these other domains that are not academic knowledge and skills. I have my own take on that, but it seems like the small group learning is actually a very sort of light, touch integrated way to get at that without trying to make teachers into therapists or something like that that perhaps is beyond their training.

Right? Yeah. Well, there's a lot of issues in or a lot of aspects to what you were just saying. One that comes immediately to mind is the idea that there's a lot of money being put into schools for intervention or for treatment. For example, mental health, as you were saying, having the teachers being trained to identify a student who is having mental health issues. My take with this work is that by integrating well done small group learning into regular instruction on a daily basis, you're doing prevention work that can oftentimes head off those kinds of problems escalating. And a second aspect to what you were saying is that there are a lot of programs out there box curriculum that sometimes you bring in as a school and use in some class to try and prevent this or to prevent that. But with small group instruction done well, again, you can get those kinds of gains without having to push aside your regular instruction and make room for something that's usually not well integrated. So there's a number of important aspects to this that really make it a no brainer Quite frankly, for schools that want to gain in academics and in student behavior, mental health and social emotional skills all at once. That's not to say it's easy. There's a lot to this. There's a lot of reasons why it's not done well. And so that's really the main challenge that schools have is fair figuring out how to do this well.

So let's get to the efficacy questions in just a moment. I want to stay one more beat on this because in terms of sort of why small group learning induces these positive outcomes, I assume there's causal mechanisms underneath. And I can imagine it's probably everything from increased active learning for students, increased talk time, and then perhaps even more personalization for the individuals, whether that's level or maybe heterogeneous experiences that allow people to play the role of teacher and student and sort of switch in these pure environments, but sort of do. Do we know the mix and specifically what those causal factors are?

Yeah, there is a lot of research into different causal factors. I don't think anyone, any one study has tried to pit them against one another. But there's a lot of theories about why it works. One is more cognitive, as we were talking about a little earlier. The idea that talking about something, reading and summarizing something, having to explain it to somebody else, engages parts of the brain that are simply not active when someone is sitting and listening passively. So there is a school of thought that it's very cognitive. My interest is more social. I think there's a lot of social benefits that, that come out of this when the teacher does this. Well, there is a lot of positive reinforcement happening for behavior that contributes to learning in the classroom. And that's not just from the teacher, but it's from peers as well. And so there's opportunities to shift social norms such that peers are seen as being in favor of achievement rather than opposed to it. And there's also the idea of changing the way that a student feels about themselves. The idea that competence, the desire to be competent, is such a strong desire. And the desire to be accepted by peers is also similarly important with kids. And when working in small groups, having the opportunity to fulfill an important role in a group and then getting positive feedback from peers actually builds that confidence, enhances those relationships and leads to greater motivation.

It's fascinating about the peer to peer impacts on this both as a cause of greater engagement and positive pro social behavior, if you will, but also as an effect. It seems like that there's sort of almost a virtuous circle, if I understand you correctly.

Exactly. Yep. I just published a paper about that, actually looking at positive peer relations and victimization and the idea that in a lot of schools you can have a negative feedback circle or a positive feedback circle in a negative direction, such that fewer peer skills and less peer acceptance lead to more victimization, which leads to fewer, you know, fewer supporters. Peer supporters, that kind of thing. So you can have these negative cycles, but when you're in a small group context, in a peer learning or cooperative learning context, you can actually get a more virtuous circle started, such that you're building social skills, you're building acceptance, there's less victimization, and that in turn leads to enhanced social relations, etc. So, yeah, it can go in both directions, but the idea with small, small group learning is that you can send it off in the right direction for you.

Yeah, it's fascinating also because in, in my view, and I'm writing actually literally revising a chapter right now in my forthcoming book about From Reopen to Reinventing.

Oh, good. I was going to ask you what book you're working on. I knew there was something.

Yeah, this is the something, right? There's always something. But so, but this is incredibly important, I think, in my mind, because from our research and the jobs to be done that children have, a core one is having fun with friends on a daily basis. As you know. And the problem is schools are too often structured as places where having fun with friends is either discouraged or sort of kept out of the academic experience. And so you've just actually given a solution that perhaps requires less of a shift to maybe even a project based project set of modalities, which I think can be incredibly helpful for this as well. But this may be an easier shift for many people to create these environments. Is that. Yeah, how do you see that?

No, yeah, that's exactly right. Project based learning is defined in a lot of different ways, and I'm a fan of it. But it does take a fairly significant shift, as you're saying. And you can do projects individually or you can do them in small groups. So it's not that it's separate or that it's the same as what I'm talking about, but it is a different way of doing things. But it does oftentimes involve students working over many days, many weeks on things, needing very specialized supports, very specialized scaffolds, the teacher having to work with all the students simultaneously on their projects, having to have a very specialized way of assessing the projects. So yeah, there's a lot that goes into that that would make it more complex than something like this. So something like I'm talking about you can do with existing curricula, and you can do it within a single class period if you like. It doesn't have to span days or weeks or what have you. So there is a lot that teachers can do right out of the gate without a heck of a lot of extra work. The problem is, again, is that not a lot of teachers are aware of some of these concepts. That's what I'm finding. They do do small group work, but oftentimes it's simply a matter of putting students together and giving them a shared task and telling them to work together. And that usually is a recipe for failure because some students will not support the others or will not participate, not contribute. There can be disagreements over the direction of how to, how to go about, you know, this, addressing this deliverable. And so a lot of times there's very uneven academic outcomes and there's some negative social outcomes as people, you know, build resentment or have conflict with one one another. All it takes is really thinking about giving each student in that group a unique role, a unique task, a unique deliverable, a way to bring things together and then incentivizing them to collaborate and then having some additional support pieces in there like scaffolding and structuring social skills. And when you do that, you take this giant leap forward and students are much more likely to fulfill their role and to have that positive academic and social experience. Experience.

So it's a perfect segue where I wanted to go, which is the efficacy of these experiences that you've teased several times now. You've just given a good set of bullet points, if you will, of how to start to think about those. But I suspect doing it is harder than it sounds. So how do you create that right set of scaffolding so that it's positive that we're all rowing in the same direction? We don't have these sort of what you described. And I've seen a lot in classrooms where you throw it over and say, hey, you go all work on this, and there's five different viewpoints and what that means and just frustration mounts rather than these impacts that you're talking about. So what are, if I'm a teacher setting this up, what are my watch fors and what are my, you know, what should I avoid?

Right. Well, the, the key is to build in as many mechanisms as possible to ensure that students are, are working together what we call positive interdependence we want to make sure that there's lots of incentives so that each student in the group realizes that it's in their best interest that the other students in their group are also achieving at a high level. And there are lots of ways to do that. We talked about having each student having a specific role in the group or each student having a specific task that's a piece of the overall deliverable. You can oftentimes break things up that way. You can also do reward interdependence such that if the finished product is of a certain quality or perhaps even on a follow up assessment, if everyone in the group achieves at a certain level, then everyone in the group gets a bonus of some kind. And so there's, there are lots of ways to build in incentives so that students understand again that it's in their best interest to, to ensure that others in their group are also succeeding. Now that's only one aspect. There are, there are others as well. We want to make sure that every student has that unique role, has that unique task or some way to, to make sure that they're accountable at an individual level for their contribution. And so that teachers can do a mix of assessments such that we have some that's at the individual level and some at the level. Now one key is that we want to make sure that anything that you do with the group level is always a positive or it's always an extra. It doesn't take away. So we would never average, for example, the scores on an assessment for a group. We would only say that you can gain if everyone in your group does well. You're not going to be harmed if people in your group don't do well. So that would be one thing to look out for. And there are others too. We do, we, when we do this well, we like to be very explicit about the social skills that we want to see and scaffold them and then observe for them during the lesson. And we also want to make sure there's time at the end for reflection, processing, talking about what we did well as a group and what we could do better next time and then having peers give one another compliments. That positive peer feedback is so important in terms of reinforcing any positive behavior that we might see during the lesson and making sure it's more likely to happen next time.

So we got a question from someone that I think you just sort of obliquely addressed, but just to make it super concrete, someone said just working in small groups in this format lead to a Shared quote, unquote grade. If I'm reading you correctly, the answer is sort of on top of, but not, not exactly. Say one more beat on that.

Yeah, that's exactly right. We don't ever want. The fundamental concept is we don't want students to be negatively impacted by that group experience, only positive. So that if we do design a task such that every student can be held accountable for their component, that's great. So it is individual. But we also want to make sure that students are rewarded if other students in their group are also doing well. So if the group as a whole performs well, then students can get additional, whatever additional points, additional privileges, you know, maybe just recognition from the teacher, you know, any kind of incentive that you can imagine, anything that students would value.

This goes to another topic that I think a lot about, which is mastery based learning or competency based learning in terms of the notion that you don't get a grade for something until you show mastery for it. Until then you're either haven't started it or you're going to keep working on it. And I think this speaks to this a little bit as well, which is being super clear about the task that you're doing in the small group or the sets of tasks, which standards or competencies do they incorporate? And teasing apart some of those what I would call habits of success, the ability to collaborate and work with others and things of that nature, as opposed to say the strict academic knowledge and application of that knowledge in skill based ways. And if we're more specific about that, I think we can tease that out a little bit. So we're not sort of conflating, gee, did you or didn't you master this concept? And you're sort of impacted by others in the group that may have different levels of understanding. How do you see that overlaying in the small group setting?

Well, that's really interesting your comments. It made me think about some of the ways in which I do things when I do research. For example, as I was was I was saying, we have the idea that you want to explicitly scaffold the social skill and then observe for it and have the teacher do that during the lesson. And when you do that regularly, you can create and then you track that information. You can create a very interesting data set. How is this, this class as a whole improving in terms of their social skills? What we also do as part of the research that I do is we have students rate themselves at the end of every lesson as part of, part of that post lesson processing or as Part of that reflection stage, we will ask them to rate how much they've learned and how engaged they were and how much they enjoyed it. And then we can again capture that data after each lesson and watch the trends over time. And when we talk about how these things work together with achievement, we can see that they're all very highly correlated. As the social skill of the class goes up, the enjoyment goes up, the amount learned goes up, the grades go up, they work together, they go hand in hand and they reinforce one another.

There's another implementation aspect of this that I think is key for people to think about as well. And this is for me, and I'd love you to react, but one of the things that I've seen is that the introduction of technology into learning environments can help handle sort of the basic knowledge delivery, background knowledge building, if you will, sets of activities and, and in a blended learning environment then can create more opportunities for this sort of small group learning. And that might be everything from, you know, taking a class of 30 or even larger and dividing it up in multiple ways so that the teacher can spend discrete time in a conversation with a small group of students. Oh yeah, or it could be, you know, another group goes off to do something collaborative in a small group setting with each other while others are getting that knowledge and skill building on the computer. And so the magic of the technology, if you will, isn't necessarily what it's delivering, but more what it's enabling in sort of these environments and allows the teacher to still. We have one comment from another user here saying in developing countries, hard to get through the entire curriculum and do this deeper learning thing that you sort of described. But I think this can sort of start to break some of these trade offs is we're going to offload, if you will, the delivery strictly of getting through the curriculum to other means so that we can free up teacher time for, and human being time more generally for what humans are really good at, which is this, social interactions and so forth. I'm curious how you see it though.

Yeah, that's. There's a, again, like several different dimensions to what you're saying. One that strikes me is that yes, it's exactly right. I, when I teach at the university level, I love to do what's called a flipped classroom where I have, and I teach statistics. So it does require sometimes a bit of me talking, even though I don't really like to do that. But I have recorded those presentations over the years and I make those available for students to view offline and Then when we come to class, we have a certain amount of background knowledge, and so we can get into application, we can get into a Q and A, we can synthesize, we can apply to new situations so we don't have to dedicate time together. To me, just talking, because as you're saying, that's not very beneficial. However, I would like to also mention this idea that we need to. Someone is worried about, we need to cover the curriculum so we don't have time for this. I think that goes back to this idea that the teacher talking is the only way for students to learn. And some people have that notion that that's the way learning happens, and that's really not the way it happens. The way learning happens is when we are involved in doing something new. And it may be an instructional support of some kind, or it may be, you know, a sport, or it may be repairing something. You know, whatever it is. I mean, that's. That's the way that we are. Have been evolved to learn is in the company of others and being guided by someone. We're not. We're not trained to learn by sitting and listening, but by doing. And so a lot of times someone may think that it's more efficient to simply talk through a curriculum, but then they'll find that not very much of it was actually absorbed. And so a lot of time is spent redoing and reteaching and recovering things that have been discussed already. And so the idea that the teacher talking is more efficient is actually not true. The teacher talking is actually a lot less efficient than getting students engaged, getting them active. And it doesn't always have to be in. In small groups, but students need to be doing more of the work. They need to be actively engaging with. With what they're learning rather than simply having the teacher present it and then considering that to it that, you know, that we've covered the curriculum, that doesn't work very well anymore.

Yeah, it's a tremendous, tremendously important point. The teaching not being the same thing as learning or delivering content is not the same thing as your children actually learning it themselves. And this speaks, I think, to a major tenant of what we've been talking about, which is the more active engagement causes the brain.

Right.

To actually change its state for the longer run so that something has been absorbed and learned into memory that you.

Can retain something with. Yeah.

Yes, retain.

Retention is helped when it's more active. Right. That's why things need. Teachers need to review things so often is because sitting and listening a week later it's usually gone. If we're actively using it, that's much more effective way to encourage learning and retention.

Super helpful. I'm curious, sort of as we start to wrap up our time together, one of the things going back to that mastery based learning notion just for a moment that can seem sometimes in conflict for people in the small group settings is, well, suppose one individual just races ahead and understands the concept and is ready for that next thing and another child needs more time in the small group setting to wrestle with something.

Right?

And there's things we can do at the margins, clearly, right. Like that that child that maybe raced ahead now gets to be a teacher of the peer, which solidifies the learning and builds other skills and so forth. How do you see where are the real tensions and trade offs or where is it? Sort of as adults we're maybe overthinking it, if you will.

No, I totally agree. I think there's a lot of value to be gained in someone explaining something, even if it's that they already quote unquote know the value of explaining it to someone else is, is entirely productive. I mean, I've had that experience as a, as a statistics teacher thinking that I understood everything at a certain level. When I teach a class, I oftentimes understand things in a new way after having gone through it again. So there's a lot of value in that. And again, it's not just academic gains or gains and understanding, it's social gains as well. There's a lot of social benefits that can accrue when two students are working together, even if it's more one helping the other and not so much in the reverse direction. There's a lot of social benefits as well. A student who is successful academically may not get socially rewarded for that outside of the small group context. In fact, there may be social penalties for being very academically successful, but when you are engaged in helping another student, there's a lot of social gains to be had there just appreciation and gratitude and status for being that one that can help other people as opposed to being the brainiac who ruins the grading curve and who is shunned or bullied or what have you. So I would argue that the social gains are as much or even perhaps is more important than the academic gains.

It's fascinating and that makes a ton of sense and it also strips away the perhaps zero sum mentality of the school system where I win, you lose, sort of mindset of grading and so forth. As we wrap up our time together. Just last reflections you know, coming out of the pandemic, still somewhat in it, the race to tutoring and some of those things that we see right now in education and I think the challenges from a long term perspective of yeah, there's funds for it now perhaps, but it could go away. Small group instruction would seem to be an antidote perhaps to get a lot of the benefits from tutoring without some of those drawbacks of taking it away. Do you see it that way, number one? And number two, if so, when we think about small group instruction, what's, what's the end size of what a small group is defined as and where does it get to too unwieldy or big or how do you think about those rules of thumb?

Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. You know, peer tutoring, of course, is just one version of small group instruction. There's a lot of different things that teachers can do. And as you're saying, it's, it's something that can be done in any, any situation, any day of the school year, all school year long. And so the benefits can accrue every single day rather than, you know, simply a defined program that has a start and an end date. And it can be very sustainable. These are things that teachers can build into their skill set over the years and they can continue to teach others. It can be become part of the school's, the part of the school's milieu, part of the way they do things. I know some schools are really focused on doing more of this and that becomes really part of the school culture in the school climate. So, yeah, to answer your other question about the right size, you know, I was just reading that book by Stephen Koslan on online learning and he talks about groups of up to 6 and I would never go above 4. And I think one of the reasons that he's able to get away with that is that he doesn't have individual roles for each student in the group. He talks about groups of three within a group of six. And so then you're thinking about two roles within a group, for example, and that's easy enough for a teacher to manage. If you're trying to think of six, six different roles for a group of six, that's going to increase the complexity quite a bit. So I would never go above a group size of four. And oftentimes I use two or three just because it's easier to manage in terms of the number of different tasks or the number of different roles or whatever. One thing you don't want to do is have multiple students responsible for that same role or that same task, because then it's too easy for students to disappear and not play their part if they're not being held individually accountable for that role. So I would never go above groups of three or four at the most, just because logistically it becomes too challenging at that point.

Super helpful. And implicit in that is all the scaffolding you just talked about, also to make sure people are successful in those environments. As we wrap up, how can people follow your work, keep abreast of what you're learning in publishing and so forth?

Yeah, I would love to talk with folks that are curious about this, would like to learn more. There's, there's a lot of different ways that you can engage with this. I personally take my training in this from the Johnson brothers, David and Roger Johnson, at the University of Minnesota, and they've done a lot of work and published a lot of teacher training materials. I'm also invested in doing some, some technology support for this called peerlearning.net and you can certainly take a look at that and follow up with me if you'd like. There's a way to, to get a free license and, and it actually helps teachers to support themselves in doing this without having to worry about a lot of the logistical details, trying to take more off their plates. But yeah, I'm more than happy to speak with this. I actually have a medium.com channel as well where I've published some of these ideas. Just medium.com I think, or mark van risen.medium.com something like that. So there's a lot of writing there on, you know, how these things should be built, how these lessons should be structured in order to realize some of these powerful advantages and not go down the road of, of having these potentially negative experiences. So teachers have to be very careful about it when they, when they implement these things. But when it's done well, it can be a very, very powerful learning experience and a very positive social experience. I've seen it change the climate of a school from top to bottom, and so I'd be more than happy to talk with folks that want to learn more about this.

All right, well, that's pure learning.net Mark Vanrisen medium.com I checked it for you just to make sure that was.

Thank you.

Indeed, the address. And it is so people check out both. Mark, thanks so much for being a champion of this work and for helping translate it into what it actually looks like in the learning environment. In addition to the efficacy studies and for all of you joining in watching. If you like this content, if you like this video, of course, give it a thumbs up so we know to do more of it. And for all of you, thanks for joining us on the future of education. Thanks so much.