EL PROYECTO EN CHACRA SECA LEÓN

Children were participants exploring their world through this study by articulating their understanding of their experiences in the lessons taught by the student teachers. Their beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, views and opinions were taken into account through a small group interview (Macbeath, Frost & Pedder, 2009) so that the student teacher had a better understanding of children’s learning and could make provision accordingly. The interview with the children was conducted by the student and was minuted (Gibb, 1994) and contained semi-structured questions (outlined in the sorting activity and Thinking Fish below). This allowed for open questions to be asked with flexibility to react to the children’s responses (Punch, 2009). When working in the group for the first time the group needed to learn to work together and a set of rules was devised (Macbeath, Frost & Pedder, 2009).

The following rules were developed from my own practice as a primary school teacher and were discussed with the children:

When our group is talking and thinking aloud everyone should be asked: - What do you think?

- Why do you think that?

Everyone’s ideas should be carefully thought about We look at and listen to the person talking

We share everything we know

After discussion, we try to agree on what to do or say.

The group was set up to maximise participation (Open University, 2001). Two activities were utilised in the pilot study (case study one), however only one tool (the Thinking Fish), chosen for its effectiveness, was employed in the main study (see below). The first was used to establish the feasibility of assuming that children would offer their views to peers in the focus group (Warwick, 2007); the second to elicit the discussion.

3.9.1.1 Scaffolds for supporting children’s thinking

Reflecting on learning on the intrapersonal plane is very sophisticated. Without scaffolding, children of this age group (aged 4-11 years) are unlikely to be able to consider their metalearning as this is an abstract concept. As Piaget (Woolfolk, Hughes & Walkup, 2008) suggests, this ability to think abstractly develops around

the age of 11 years old. The children in the pilot were aged 9-10 years old. It is therefore important that they had scaffolds to support them to be able to do this, to enable them to think about their own thinking. The bespoke pedagogical tools were intentionally designed as indirect scaffolds (Warwick, Mercer & Kershner, 2013), vicariously representing the presence of the teacher (Warwick et al., 2010) as cultural artefacts to be used as tools to mediate learning (Kozulin et al., 2003) and to enable the creation of dialogic space in which such learning can occur. It became clear from the literature that a specific strategy might be particularly effective when interviewing children. The scaffolded focus group approach using prompts for reflection and discussion was strongly supported by MacBeath, Frost & Pedder (2009) (six prompts around the Fish), Hopkins (2008) (the Fish), McCallum, Hargreaves & Gipps (2000) (card sort) and the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (2004) as an effective way forward. For the focus group to be effective, I put in place a means for the children to reflect on their learning and then feedback to the student teacher about what they had learnt, how they had learnt it and what would they enable them to learn better. This process enabled the children to reflect on the intrapersonal plane and then interact with their peers and the student teacher on the interpersonal plane. I designed two support frameworks/scaffolds (Wood, Bruner & Ross, 1976) in the form of a sorting activity and the Thinking Fish; both of which are discussed below, for the children to be able to verbalise ‘think alouds’ (Mercer & Hodgkinson, 2008) in relation to their learning, that could then be fed back to the student teacher. Both bespoke pedagogical tools devised to elicit children’s understanding about their learning through scaffolding their thinking, employed ‘child friendly’ language. A fishbone outline, the Thinking Fish was developed from Hopkins (2008) as having a visual semi-structured frame for gathering information on to during the focus group discussions. The card sort was trialled successfully by McCallum (2000); the notion of talk partners is advocated and used efficiently by Alexander (2008) and Mercer (2008). Children were used to working in this way as it is equivalent to activities in their classrooms. There is no anticipation of being able to generalise from these findings, however themes emerged from the group discussions and these are drawn out in the findings chapter.

In addition to the children requiring scaffolds to articulate their understanding of learning, the tools also had to enable the student teacher to better understand children’s learning from a socio-cultural perspective. To do this the student teacher had to be able to engage with children’s understanding of their own learning so as to continue to plan and teach the children, including scaffolding future learning though the ZPD.

3.9.1.2 Sorting activity

The sorting activity was the first tool for the student teacher to support them and enable them to understand the children’s levels of understanding of the learning. The sorting activity was designed more to enable the children to get used to thinking and working in a different way and to develop the metalanguage required to be able to engage in the focus group discussion.

The sorting activity involved six statements about the process of learning for the children to reflect upon on the intrapersonal plane, and then verbalise their reflections on the interpersonal plane with a peer. These were:

The teacher stood at the front and told us things We got to do lots of interesting activities We got to work with each other

We had to think a lot but we got there in the end We learnt something new

We all behaved and were ready to go.

This activity provided a scaffold for the children’s thinking and reflection on the intrapersonal plane, then elaboration on the interpersonal plane of their own understanding of the process of learning through dialogue with a peer. There were three pairs (‘talk partners’, (Kagan & Kagan, 2009) within the group of six children. These statements were adapted from the questions used by the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (2004), and particularly the work of McCallum et al (2000), that were designed to enable children to talk about their learning and so support student teachers to understand the learning.

Figure 8 Sorting activity grid and statements 3.9.1.3 The Thinking Fish

The second tool that I adapted was based on the work of Hopkins (2008) and it was the Thinking Fish (see figure 9). This is another scaffold designed to be used with a small group rather than pairs of children, thus creating a scaffolded focus group discussion with semi-structured discussion prompts. Littleton & Mercer (2013) note discussion in the focus group has the potential to extend the thinking of the children on the interpersonal plane. It has the same purpose as the sorting activity to enable the children to talk about their learning. The Thinking Fish is effectively a ‘talking frame’ (DCSF, 2008). It has prompts around the outside on the skeleton of the Fish to encourage the discussion. This was devised to encourage greater elaborations of the talk about learning by the children on the interpersonal plane which the sorting activity did not allow for as the latter was a more closed activity with prompts that were developing the children’s metalanguage about learning as discussed. It is this tool which was taken forward into the main study due to the effectiveness of its operation. The student teacher selected six children to be in the focus group (see above). These children participated in the focus group consistently across the period of research. The Thinking Fish was used in two ways during the discussion with the children. The first was an open question, “What worked well for you as a learner?” In this, the children had to consider what, during the lesson, had been

effective for their learning and then share their thoughts as a group. The student teacher here facilitated the discussion, annotated the Fish or supported the children to annotate the Fish themselves, depending on the ability of the children. The second question asked of the focus group of children about their learning was “What would be even better if...?” The student teacher could then either use two different Fish scaffolds, or one Fish and change colour of pen for the annotations. These questions asking children to reflect on their learning are familiar to children in the classroom as the language associated with self/peer assessment.

I recognised that this Thinking Fish process is the children talking about the effectiveness of the student teacher’s practice in places and therefore this could be perceived as the children being encouraged to undermine the practice of the student teacher in the classroom. However, it is structured so that the children see it as a discussion about the lesson and what they did and so on; not about a child criticising a student teacher, which could be perceived as threatening or inappropriate. This may indicate a more subtle power shift because this entire process of the children feeding back on the lesson that the student teacher has just taught is deliberately designed as a reciprocal learning relationship: children learning from the student teacher and the student teacher learning from the children.

Figure 9 the Thinking Fish

During the main study some student teachers adapted the Thinking Fish to suit the conceptual area of the lesson in which they were teaching; for example if the class was studying space then the Thinking Fish was adapted into a ‘thinking astronaut’. It is important to note here that the prompts remained the same. It was the picture that changed. Possible differences are explored in the analysis to see if a change in picture influenced children’s constructions.

3.9.1.4 Photographic recording of focus group data

The focus group discussions were minuted in the form of photographs (Mukherji & Albon, 2015) of the tools following use by the children with the student teacher. The photographic data collection method designed for capturing the information from these two tools was intentionally straightforward and as time efficient as possible for the student teacher. It was also standard practice for student teachers on the PGCE to record children’s work by taking photographs. In the photograph, the summary of the discussion was captured rather than the details. The student took a photograph of the sorted cards for each pair, after each

session and the same for the Thinking Fish after each of the two questions during the focus group discussions. It would be ideal to record discussions of the children talking, about their learning and learning processes, however, the chosen approach took into consideration the context of the classroom, the short time available to student teachers undertaking a PGCE, as well as a pragmatic solution to the complexities of data collection.

These photographs not only provided a quick and accurate way of recording the summarised outcome of what was said during the focus group and feedback sessions with the student teachers, so that actions could be followed through and learning opportunities connected. Some researchers (Open University, 2001) have highlighted minuting meetings as an efficient way of gaining an understanding of what happened rather than having to wade through long transcripts to get to the key information required. The photographs represented the minutes from the meeting of the focus groups. Clearly the disadvantage here is that the whole context cannot be re-evaluated after the event, however the ‘nub’ of the discussions were captured and can be returned to.