Inquiry Update

 Over the course of the semester, I struggled to find an explicit question for my inquiry. Initially, I was inspired to explore the effects of competition in the classroom; the effect it has on students, as well as how it is implicitly incorporated in modern pedagogy. In my initial literature, I found excessive evidence pointing to the negative qualities of competition on learning; this is not to say it does not have a place, however it was clear that I would not need to dig deep to demonstrate negative qualities.

Hoping to explore anti-competitive classroom cultures, I opted to focus my attention on collaboration. There was a tremendous amount of literature from the 80s and 90s suggesting the benefits of collaboration, however much of it was theoretical and did not offer practical suggestions. The main exception to this was a beautiful book titled ‘Collaboration in Mathematics Classrooms’ (1990), which compiled essays from various teachers explaining how they organize their class to emphasis collaborative activities. This book offers many useful strategies, however there is minimal consideration of the teacher’s role beyond facilitator / organizer of the class. Reading this book, I realized what I was searching for: research explaining how teachers might encourage a collaborative culture in their classroom.

My next deep dive into the literature was successful: I found two papers which extensively detail the ways teachers build a collaborative classroom culture. The first paper is an extensive study of a senior teacher leading an ‘average’ class of Math 8s using a whole-class, inquiry-based pedagogy. The paper details many explicit strategies used by the teacher to facilitate this classroom, as well as how the teacher ‘taught’ the class to adopt more collaborative attitudes. The second paper is a general review of how collaborative learning is implemented in the classroom; it specifically considers how to improve the quality of student interactions. The development of ‘Common Ground’ is a notable theme common to both papers.

These lengthy papers were dense with strategy – there are a few other papers I hope to review before presentations, however I feel summarizing & connecting the two I’ve mentioned will be immensely valuable for anyone hoping to facilitate a collaborative classroom. I also plan preface this conversation with my earlier research by discussing questions such as: ‘What is collaboration?’, ‘What are the benefits?’ and ‘When does it work?’.