UNAP: Universidad Arturo Pratt

Teachers from both approaches suggested that the choice of approach was due to being what their learner’s wanted or expected

T8: [workshop] A lot of my students don’t tend to care for group work, they like to do it for themselves.

T17: [group] And that’s the way that we teach and that’s the way that it’s always been here because that’s what our learners expect.

Yet it seems difficult to see how the learners would be able to differentiate prior to attending the class. Compare the following two groups, one using a workshop and the other whole group approach. They were taught within five miles of each other, during the day, in school classrooms under a community education umbrella and aiming for ECDL qualification. Class sizes were roughly equal at 9 and 8 learners respectively. In both cases age was distributed fairly evenly in the three age categories over 37, each comprising 2 males and the remainder females. The only distinguishing feature seemed to be that the workshop group had a higher percentage of learners wanting the qualification ‘for work’ while the

whole group class had a high percentage of learners wanting to ‘find out more about ICT’. This might lead one to suppose, therefore, that learners carefully choose courses which matched their aims and the way they wanted to learn.

However, neither course prospectus indicated teaching approach so the learners were unlikely to know before hand which approach was used. Several of the learners even commented that they had no prior knowledge of how the course would be taught. Even if they had, as one centre manager confirmed, this could not be guaranteed as teachers were free to teach as they wanted. Generally the learners seem to be happy with either approach. Several of the workshop learners said that they were glad the teaching was one-to-one and that they could work at their own pace

L: [workshop] I would advise anyone to learn by this method because it’s quite relaxed and you work at your own pace.

L: [workshop] I like being able to sit in front of the computer with a book at your own pace.

L: [workshop] I hoped we weren’t all going to have to work at the same level, at the same pace sorry, because I think that puts pressure on.

but the whole group learners were also happy with their approach valuing group dynamics and not identifying pace as a problem

L: [group] ….. we’ve all worked together getting things off each other. So [name of teacher] has gone through it with us been we’ve been able to keep up…….. and we’ve been able to, like, work as a team as well. And I think that’s good as well.

This indication of satisfaction with the approach to teaching may be because learners feel a loyalty to their teacher or perhaps because learners just accept

the given approach rather than deliberately choosing it. However, it seems likely that it is the teachers’ or institutions’ perceptions of learners’ wants, rather than the learners’, that determines which approach is used.

Like the learners above many of the workshop teachers emphasized that their learners wanted to work at their own pace and not be slowed down by others.

T8: [working as a group] slows them down. And I know that I don’t like to be slowed down either, having to wait for people who are slower to catch up. And some people are just wanting to race ahead to get their things done, so that’s come out as the main reason people don’t like it. They think it’s interrupting what they could be doing.

These teachers saw the one-to-one teaching opportunities of the workshop approach as the best way to deal with individual learner’s needs and differentiation.

T7: ….. how we are teaching really it’s all one-to-one. I think that’s - you can concentrate on what that person needs. If you’re teaching the whole class, in my view, you concentrate on that, but he might know and he doesn’t and he knows half. So you’re not tailoring it to their individual needs, you are with one-to-one, yea………. They [learners] sort of dictate what they want to know, how much in depth. Takes them differently that’s the beauty of one-to-one. Teaching at their level.

R: Why have you chosen that approach?

T15: For the simple fact that you’ve got people at all different levels and ability. With IT it’s very, very hard, I think very hard to keep everybody at the same level.

About half of the workshop teachers described introducing new courses as a group but after a week or two as learner differentiation began to emerge reverting to the workshop approach. These teachers seem to view learning as a

linear activity; the learner had to get from A to B and progress was to do with the speed of the journey. Or as one teacher put it

T14: ….. like a personal race where they all start on the starting blocks and then continue through the workbooks and they all work at different paces.

This implies learning is a progression in which each learner’s journey is the same, only the speed might vary. Such a view makes differentiation problematic. The argument goes that to keep learners together as a group you have to stop the fast movers from going forwards by giving them additional practice exercises at the same level, or you have to move slower learners on before they are ready. But for many of the workshop teachers that was unacceptable,

T15: They want to come out to do some form of IT qualification and I think it’s wrong to keep the fast learner at the same level as the slow learner and vice versa.

T8 explained that she had recently recent attended a course that meant that she now interpreted differentiation in terms of difficulty of task rather than speed

T8: I’d been taught that differentiation meant giving someone larger handouts and making extra exercises and now the swing’s been towards differentiation in the difficulty of the tasks. Everybody gets the same but the task gets harder, harder and harder, and you stop at the point that you can do to in the time or ability that you’ve got.

But even here she seemed to perceive the journey as essentially the same merely extended for more able learners. T16 rather emphasized learning as a process than a journey. He used ‘open-ended’ tasks enabling learners to develop individual solutions, thus making each learner’s journey different. This approach was perhaps made possible because T16 worked in a non-

examination environment. T8’s subsequent remarks showed that for her, the need for learners to ‘get through the exam’ meant that initially everyone had to experience the set path and then the more able could ‘do that little bit more’ taking them beyond the examination competencies.

For examination courses an additional problem arising from the ‘race’ approach was also observed; that is some learners completed the set course ahead of others and wanted to take the test. This meant that in all observed workshop, examination orientated classes there was a ‘rolling examination’ process. While there may be advantages to learners to be able to sit the test when ready and move on to the next stage, this impacted on the social conditions within the classroom. Not only did test-takers need to be found seats away from the remainder of the class but the non-test-takers had to remain quiet thus constraining social interaction. Examination flexibility was cited as a reason for using the workshop approach but was also perhaps contributory to restricting interaction encouraging individual and isolated activity.