From Seatwork to Feetwork by Ron Nash

Author:Ron Nash [Nash, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2020-12-22T09:34:31.294989+00:00

“Do Your Own Work!”

I wish I had a nickel for every time I uttered that command over my teaching career. Really, I do. Add to it “Sit up straight!” as well as “Hunker down and think!” and you have a pretty good idea that cooperative learning was not in my bag of instructional strategies. My student desks were in six rows of six, with students facing me in perfect parade-ground order. I obsessed about how straight the rows were (picture little pieces of tape on the floor against which the right front leg of each desk was placed) and I “ran a tight ship.” If my students could find a job on an assembly line, in a machine shop, in the military, or in any number of industrial-age positions, then dressing properly, getting to work on time, paying attention, following instructions, and getting the job done was pretty much what they could expect to have to do. Mine was the language of compliance, not of thinking or learning. That was what my freshmen must have realized I valued above all, and I think they may have been on to something.

Because I placed a high premium on order and discipline in my early classrooms, I believed that straight rows of students who listened, took notes, and generally “did their best” qualified as an excellent classroom. Many administrators felt the same way and often looked askance at classrooms where the noise level was too high, and cooperative-learning sessions can get loud. I put my students in teams for competitive review games and publicly acknowledged the attainment of high grades in hopes of getting others to try to catch those high performers. I always thought in terms of “Norm can do better!” on his own if he just “put his nose to the grindstone.” (I may actually have written that on a report card at some point.) It never really occurred to me that by harnessing the power of cooperation and truly effective collaborative learning, I could have improved performance for Norm and most of his classmates.

One reason I used to give—and I was not alone here, by any stretch of the imagination—for not having students work in groups was that one or two students might wind up doing all the work, while Norm went along for the ride or threw a monkey wrench into the works. Rather than think this through or work it out, I used it as an excuse to maintain the individualistic status quo. On rare occasions when I tried what we then called “group work,” I never made an effort to do what was necessary to keep Norm or anyone else from taking a free ride, which could upset and even anger the rest of the group members. The chaos that resulted from my failure to train my students to be cooperative members of a functioning pair or group simply kept me from repeating the exercise more than a couple of times. It was simply easier four decades ago to remind everyone to get to class on time, take notes, and pay attention.

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