Miguel was a shy and withdrawn child who spoke no English and who stuttered when he spoke Spanish. His Spanish reading and writing skills were very low, and although math was his strength, nobody seemed to notice. Recently arrived from Mexico, Miguel lived with relatives more than 10 adults and three children in a two bedroom apartment. He came to school hungry and tired, wearing dirty clothes. Shunned by his classmates, who said he had the "cooties," Miguel was left out of group activities. Even when he had a specific role, other members of the group would take over and tell him what to do. Miguel was obviously a low-status student. When I observed Miguel's group I saw that the other members simply wouldn't give him a chance. Cooperative learning was not helping him at all. (Shulman, Lotan, & Whitcomb, 1997, p. 69)
The story of Miguel is not uncommon. Teachers who use cooperative learning precisely because they want to see all students actively talking and working together. It is painful to see certain students ignored by the group and forced into social isolation. Teachers are also asking for help with problems of social dominance. Some students take over the group, telling other people what to do and trying to do all the work themselves. Strangely enough, social isolation and social dominance are two sides of the same coin. They are two ways in which cooperative learning reveals status differences among students.
Creating Equal-Status Interaction
Fortunately, ways are available to treat the effects of status differences during groupwork. These methods are inexpensive and can bring results in a relatively short time. However, making them work requires an understanding of how these differences in behavior in the group come about. Once teachers understand the process that produces Miguel's predicament, they can see how the treatment is designed to change that situation in a way that will change the behavior.
Observing the Effects of Status
In a small group, low-status members talk less than others; when they do speak up, no one takes their ideas seriosly and other members may not even listen to what they have to say. Low-status group members have trouble getting their hands on materials for the group task; they may even be physically excluded.
In contrast, high-status members talk much more than other people. Their suggestions often become the group's decision. They are much better at talking than they are at listening. These patterns of inequality within the group often indicate the effects of status differences.
Very often, teachers confuse status problems with personality characteristics of individual students, such as assertiveness, shyness, low self-esteem, or low self-concept. The failure to participate does not come from the personality of the low-status child. It is situational. Changing the social situation will change the behavior.
Underlying Causes of Inequality
In the typical classroom, students tend to rank order themselves and one another on a number of status characteristics. They feel that it is better to be high in these agreed-on rankings than low. Academic and peer status are the most important status chacteristics in the classroom. Students rank one another on how good a student each person is. As any teacher knows, students also rank one another on attractiveness or popularity, which is what I call peer status.
Other status characteristics are social cclass, race, ethnicity and among older students, gender. These societal status characteristics affect the creation of academic and peer status orders in the classroom. For example, Miguel's dirty clothes and impoverished background as well as his status as a newcomer undoubtedly had something to do with his low rank among peers in the classroom. Likewise, his inabiliy to speak English well or to read in any language probably led to his low academic status. However, the relationship of societal status to peer status is not always so straightforward. In many racially and ethnically diverse middle school classrooms I have studied, African American and Lartino students have been among the most popular. For these popular students, race or ethnicity did not seem to affect their interaction with others. For that reason, teachers should avoid assuming that students from particular racial or ethnic backgrounds will have low status in groups.
Students also rank one another on specific skills and abilities, such as being good with computers, knowing all about Dungeons and Dragons, or being able to compute rapidly without pencil and paper. Any one of these different kinds of status has the power to affect what happens in small groups that are working on a collective task.
The sources of the observed differences in behavior are the different expectations for competence that are attached to being high or low on any status characteristic. For example, students who are popular are generally expected to be competent at a wide range of important tasks. Similarly, students who are social isolates are generally expected to have nothing to contribute to many tasks.
As soon as a teacher assigns a collective task to a group containing students who are high and low on any of these status characteristics, high-status students expect to be—and are expected to be—more competent at the new cooperative task, whereas low-status students expect to be—and are expected to be—less competent. As a result of these different expectations, a self-fulfilling prophecy occurs. High-status students are more active and are judged by others to have made more of a contribution. Low-status students are less active and influential. When the group finishes its task, the final power and prestige order is the same as the initial rank order on status.
Consequences
Research has consistently shown that when groups are working on open-ended, challenging tasks, those who talk more learn more (Cohen & Lotan, 1997). Thus, low-status students who are not active learn less as a result of their low rates of participation. In addition, because the group is not taking advantage of all the ideas and resources of each member, the product sufers. The ideas of the dominant member may be incorrect, and no one realizes that this high-status person can be quite wrong.
Making Groups Equitable
Teachers want to see everyone participating and learning. By using intrinsically interesting and challenging tasks, they hope to see renewed enthusiasm and motivation for learning. To produce this outcome, they must treat and change those expectations for competence and incompetence that are causing the inequalities. My colleagues and I have developed two interventions for this purpose: using a multiple-abilities treatment and assigning competence to low-status students.
The Multiple-Abilities Treatment
Instead of accepting uniformly high expectations for the high-status student and uniformly low expectations for the low-status student, the teacher can create a mixed set of expectations for everyone. Because people combine expectations in deciding what each person has to contribute to a task, mixed expectations for competence will greatly reduce the differences in participation between high- and low-status students.
- The cooperative task requires many different intellectual abilities.
- No one will have all these abilities.
- Everyone will have some of these abilities.
Of course, the group task must be sufficiently rich to call on multiple intellectual abilities. For example, the task might combine reading, writing, or computing with role playing, building models, creating songs, or creating a poster. (See Cohen, Designing Groupwork, 1994a, chapter 5, on how to create rich multiple-ability tasks.)
Listen in on Ms. Morris's 4th grade class as she includes a multiple-abilities treatment in her orientation to a group task.Today you will find out what makes popcorn pop. The task card will show you how to heat up the popcorn. This is a task that is going to require many different intellectual abilities. Some of you will be good at observing very carefully what happens. Some of you may have valuable knowledge about what is inside the kernal of popcorn. Others will have the ability to draw an accurate picture of what happens to the corn. Still others will be good at making hypotheses about what has happened. Now it stands to reason that no one person will have all these abilities, but everyone will have some of these abilities. I want to see you all using one another as resources to do the best possible job.
Some teachers find the multiple-abilities treatment difficult at first. They have never thought of abilities in this multidimensional way. Actually, breaking down intellectual abilities into specific skills that can be learned is very much in line with Sternberg's latest work (1998) on intelligence.
Some teachers have a hard time believing that certain students who seem “out of it” do have something to contribute in the intellectual realm. When tasks require multiple abilities, and when teachers use this treatment, both students and teachers discover that every student does have intellectual contributions to make.
Assigning Competence to Low-Status Students
Candida Graves, a 4th grade teacher of a bilingual classroom, describes what happened when she assigned competence to a low-status student.One day I had a student named Juan. He was extremely quiet and hardly ever spoke. He was not particularly academically successful and didn't have a good school record. He had just been in the country for two or three years and spoke just enough English to be an LEP student. I didn't notice that he had many friends, but not many enemies either. Not that much attention was paid to him.We were doing an activity that involved decimal points, and I was going around and noticed he was the only one out of his group that had all the right answers. I was able to say, “Juan! You have figured out all of this worksheet correctly. You understand how decimals work. You really understand that kind of notation. Can you explain it to your group? I'll be back in a minute to see how you did.” And I left. I couldn't believe it; he was actually explaining it to all the others. I didn't have faith it was going to work, but in fact he explained it so well that all of the others understood it and were applying it to their worksheets. they were excited about it. So then I made it public among the whole class, and from then on they began calling him “the smart one.” this spread to the area where he lived, and even today kids from there will come and tell me about the smart one, Juan. I thought, “All of this started with a little intervention!” (Graves & Graves, 1991, p. 14)
Once the teacher has set the stage with the multiple-abilities strategy, assigning competence to low-status students is a second treatment for modifying expectations. If the teacher publicly evaluates a low-status student as being strong on a particular multiple ability, that student will tend to believe the evaluation, as will the other students who overhear the evaluation. Once the evaluation has been accepted, expectations for competence in this task are likely to result in increased activity by, and influence of, the low-status student. Success at this task will translate into success in future group-work tasks, as it did in the case of Juan.
- The evaluation must be public.
- The evaluation must be truthful and specific, referring to particular intellectual abilities or skills.
- The abilities or skills of the low-status student must be made relevant to the group task.
The public recognition of competence is a key factor. Assigning competence is not simply a treatment for the low-status student – it is a treatment for the group. Because the problem lies partly in the expectations that others have for the low-status student, these expectations must be changed. Caution: The low-status student knows what he or she has done, so a false assignment of competence will do more harm than good (see Cohen 1994a, 1994b).
Rachel Lotan and I have found that the more frequently teachers use these two interventions, the higher the rate of participation of low-status students will be (Cohan & Lotan, 1995, 1997). A teacher does not have to be a therapist to raise expectations of competence for low-status students. It is within your power as a teacher to creat equitable small groups.
