Engagement and personalities

My observations today (8.16.12) were focussed on a group consisting of Sam, Sarah, and Christine. I found the interplay of their personalities to be very interesting. In order to properly frame these interactions, I should note that my observations occurred one day after the class had revisited it's classroom expectations. This recovering of expectations had a noticeable impact on Sam's behavior.

To begin the day the three of them were working their assignment as a single group. Within this group, Sam took an active role as the group leader (something I hadn't seen much of previously). In this role he largely acted as the source of knowledge. He told the other two how things worked and they could ask questions. Christine was willing to engage within the group dynamic, asking a fair number of questions. Sarah engaged in asking questions, but less then Christine. Sam worked somewhat diligently at answer the questions, using a variety of examples.

Eventually, however, Christine left the group to work with another neighbor. While I couldn't hear their conversation, from observing their physical interactions and expressions they appeared to working together on the whiteboard in a fairly lively back and forth. This left Sam and Sarah to work together. In this setting Sam began by giving Sarah explanations to her questions. But this quickly ran aground as Sarah stopped asking questions. The two of them then proceeded to sit for extended periods of time either working on their own papers or simple looking at other groups. Sarah appeared to look at Christine's group with what I interpreted as longing.

After a break Christine came back to the group and Sam took his computer to side of the room. With Christine and Sarah working together, they jointly discussed a wide variety of ideas and were highly productive. Sam appeared to be engaging in physics readings and/or videos, but it was not completely clear.

To understand why these interactions occurred as they did I find it useful to employ Lave and Wenger's idea of communities of practice. The Energy Project employs a set of classroom norms that differ from the typical K-12 classroom. Most classrooms operate using a transmissionist paradigm, in which knowledge and authority derives from a top-down structure. In Energy Project the instructors and the students (teachers in this case) create a community of learners in which there still remains differentiated roles, but the power higher-archy is greatly reduced. As a way to increase teacher buy-in for this model and to create a more jointly-negotiated set of norms (a requisite to creating a community of learners) the teachers were explicitly asked what norms they'd like to observe during the class.

Most of the teachers quickly took to the community norms of the community, which included the participation and valuing of all members ideas regardless of their alignment with the accepted scientific models. Once these norms were accepted the teachers began taking a fairly rapid transition from peripheral participants to full participants. This full participation was visible through the teachers willingness to push on the direction that the group takes (whether that's changing the questions on worksheets, determining what activities should be done next, or enforcing the group norms on other members). However, I think that while Sam is a member of the community, he never made that transition to full participant.

Sam can be seen trying to change the group dynamics to a more traditional transmissionist style learning, but as a peripheral participant he doesn't have enough status within the group to make those kind of changes. Even in small groups, the negotiation of how things will be done does not work for him. Group members either leave his group or stop participating. Because of this mismatch of expectations (between answer seeking and sense-making), Sam often leaves groups to engage in answer seeking by looking up information on his laptop.

I should also add that I saw similar interactions in my video clips from the day before where Sarah would often shut down when the group engaged in answer seeking. More analysis of this will be included in my final presentation.