ABSTRACT
Children rarely do practical science on their own. It is perhaps worth pausing to consider why as teachers we tend to group children together to undertake scientific enquiries. One reason is practicality; we tend not to have enough equipment and resources for each child to undertake an individual investigation. Another rationale is peer tutoring: if children can help each other solve the practical problems they encounter they are less likely to come to us for help and we can direct our scarce adult support to groups or individuals who find the activity difficult. Linked to this is the development of children’s speaking and listening skills as they ‘talk science’ to each other in groups. This aspect of language development is something we will consider further in Chapter 7. But I wonder whether the idea that doing science collaboratively enhances children’s creativity enters our rationale. This links back to the notion of ‘social creativity’ (Harrington 1990) I introduced in Chapter 2, with ‘middle c’ creativity (Craft 2008) – which groups of people are able to create in the space between their minds – lying between the ‘Big C’ creativity of genius and the ‘little c’ creativity in which originality is unique to the individual. In other words, children are able to be more creative when they have the opportunity to ‘bounce’ their ideas off each other in collaborative work than they would be on their own. However, experience tells us that not all groups are natural forums for creative thinking. In a study of children’s creative group work, Mardell et al. (2008: 114) found that ‘while some groups come together quickly, exude a sense of purpose and vitality, and provide a context for both individual and collective learning, others lack flow and do not promote creative learning’. Part of the reason for this lies in group composition: we may need to try out several combinations of children with different temperaments, friendships, ideas and capabilities to find the optimum combination for groups to ‘gel’. Group size is also crucial: many scientific activities work well in pairs, whereas more
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complex activities with clearly defined roles may need group sizes of up to five. However, we may also need to teach children how to cooperate, particularly if they have little previous experience of working in collaborative groups. In Mardell’s study the crucial factor was the opportunity for children to talk about their experience of working in a group and to come up with their own theories of how to make the group work well. Presenting children with stories about group learning helps foster metacognition – an awareness of their own learning processes in groups and an ability to discuss how well they have worked together. For example, Leanne, a teacher of 5-6-year-olds, wanted children to work together to explore a collection of puppets in order to investigate the properties of the materials they were made from. In order to raise children’s awareness of the cooperative skills that the children would need to develop in order to progress in this kind of group enquiry she acted out two ‘stories’ of groups: one in which two children argued over resources and tore the puppet, then another, which involved speaking very loudly over each other. These scenarios allowed her to make some teaching points about the need to speak, listen and cooperate in appropriate ways. One of the criteria for children’s evaluation of the subsequent investigation was ‘how well we worked together’. Working in groups can develop in children a wide range of personal attitudes and dispositions which are essential for success in science as well as contributing to their broader well-being. The traditional image of the lone scientist tinkering away in the laboratory is far from the truth. Scientists in the twenty-first century tend to collaborate in multi-disciplinary, often international teams, with frequent informal communication in addition to the papers and conferences on which the scientific community depends. Scientists, like most professionals, need what Gardner (1999) calls ‘interpersonal intelligence’ and what Goleman (1996) calls ‘emotional intelligence’: an ability to perceive what others are thinking and feeling and adapt our speech and actions accordingly. Fortunately, our primary curricula have recently recognised the importance of developing in children these wider aspects of learning to be able to relate to others and act effectively in the world. A published primary science scheme which seeks to develop children’s emotional intelligence and group working skills is Smart Science (Bianchi and Barnett 2006) – see Chapter 1 – which builds upon the Personal Capabilities in Science Project at Sheffield Hallam University (Bianchi 2002) and is linked to several UK government initiatives such as The Children’s Plan (DCSF 2007), Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) (DCSF 2005) and the latest version of the Northern Ireland curriculum statement (DENI 2007). For example, in the Smart Science ‘eco-consultants’ task (free to download from www.personalcapabilities.co.uk/smartscience/) children are asked to share ideas to give advice to a conservation group in the Galapagos Islands, predicting the effects of changes of habitat on the populations of interdependent living things within the food web. The groups use a set of hoops with different numbers of children standing in each to model their ideas about what will happen to the numbers of various organisms such as whales, penguins, sardines, zooplankton and phytoplankton. At the end of the activity children review how well their group has collaborated to create and communicate an effective exploration using a ‘thumbs up, thumbs sideways, thumbs down’ self-assessment against a ‘Smart grid’ with the following criteria:
We shared our ideas and what we already knew about . . . We made links between our ideas by . . . We agreed on an outcome by . . . We talked about how different organisms in the food web could affect each
other, e.g. . . . We explained how different factors affected the food web, e.g. . . .
