I’m beginning what I think will be an extended investigation of how the different Energy Project instructors interact with small groups. At the end of Thursday morning, E2 was split into two groups, one of which interacted with Stamatis and the other with Leslie, each for about 90 minutes. I am still in the process of watching the videos. For now, some pictures.
Stamatis started out off to the side, listening; then interacted from that position; then, when the group was not getting what he was asking, moved to a central location. The group of five stayed in their starting positions, spaced out with a fair amount of elbow room between them. They continued to have trouble identifying the question they were supposed to be addressing.
Leslie started out perched on the table; the group she talked to was clustered fairly tightly together. Leslie eventually sat in a chair, so that the formation was a lot like Stamatis's group above, but a lot tighter. (To me the group feels smaller, even though it has more people.)
At one point the group went over to a computer together and had a discussion there. They then returned to the tighter seated cluster formation.
To me, the tighter clustering in Leslie's group fits with the sense I have of the interaction, which was that it was a tight collaboration.
Rachel, I immensely enjoyed reading this blog post! Part of me wants to pursue the participation framework studies that I've started, last year. This really makes me want to think about ways to incorporate participation frameworks into my thinking about proximal formative assessment. I wonder if there are correlations between teachers' assessment practices and the way they orient and position themselves toward the students...
ReplyDeleteLeslie and Stamatis are surely very aware of the interplay between intellectual and physical positioning, since they have been intentional about moving the furniture in their classroom. In small groups, though, I would guess that their physical positioning is mostly unconscious. That makes it all the more fascinating as an indicator of/influence on the intellectual part of the interaction.
ReplyDeleteCan you make a tighter collaboration happen by drawing people closer together physically? Or will it only work if people are already feeling close? My guess is that for a given set of people/relationships/activities, there's a range of "positionings" that will be accessible, with a variety of affordances. Then there are other positionings that will not happen because they are outside the range of options for that interaction. I bet the spread-out group would not have consented to squeeze together even if they were explicitly requested to do so; it would just feel wrong.
Interesting! It certainly makes intuitive sense that there would be a correlation between how close group members are and the level of collaboration. I wonder if this can be thought of as a causation - proximity influences the engagement of the participants and / or the engagement of the participants influences their proximity. If we look at the video (which I'm hoping to narrow down and post soon), the members in Leslie's group got closer together as the conversation livened (for example Lezlie, who was hovering initially, pulled up a chair when new ideas were introduced and several group members became louder and more animated.)
ReplyDeleteI'm interested to see if positioning students in tighter groups would lead to active discussions more often. I'm going to test this in my physics classes this upcoming year. I suspect the conversations I see will certainly be active but not necessarily always on topic. I'm thinking this sort of positioning might better support collaboration but I'm not convinced I can use it to elicit collaboration.
This is something that is highly culturally dependent. Clustering close together (and how close is considered close) has very different meaning in different cultures. In this particular case, all the participants in both groups are white Americans, so maybe it doesn't matter that much. But there are gender differences between the groups. Do women tend to sit closer together than men?
ReplyDeleteI want to claim that close and far have culturally-independent meaning in the sense that physical closeness symbolizes abstract closeness. It might symbolize emotional closeness, intellectual closeness, family closeness, I don't know what, and I would guess that to be culturally dependent (as well as how close is close). But still, physical closeness would symbolize some other kind of more abstract closeness; height difference would symbolize power difference (I would think - as in superiority and inferiority); etc.
ReplyDelete"Leslie and Stamatis are surely very aware of the interplay between intellectual and physical positioning... In small groups, though, I would guess that their physical positioning is mostly unconscious."
ReplyDeleteI have not been able to forget the cameras and am still ridiculously aware of everything I am doing (even - perhaps especially - positioning). (Hard to go from EPSRI Scholar to Instructor!) So I can say that the positioning was not entirely unconscious.
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ReplyDeleteAs for "highly culturally dependent" (Sam), I remember Joe having two "guest" chairs in his office - one where you face Joe knee-to-knee, and one where you stare off in the same direction as Joe (like the driver/passenger in a car). He said that men, overwhelmingly, choose the chair where they will face the same way and the women always choose to be facing him. (In fact, I think he put the chairs in this configuration for this reason - probably read something about bonobos and chairs.) He told me this when I (naturally) took the knee-to-knee chair.
ReplyDeleteSo the women/men thing might be at play here.