Ep. 79: Zooming In On Group Work with Dr. Claire Honeycutt
Make sure to read Claire’s guest blog post here.
How to reach Dr. Claire Honeycutt PhD
Transcript
Melissa Milner 0:09
Welcome to The Teacher As... podcast. I'm your host Melissa Milner, a teacher who is painfully curious and very easily inspired. This podcast is ever changing. And I hope with each season, you find episodes that speak to you in your work as an educator. This is the fourth season of The Teacher As... and it's exciting to see the growth in how many educators are listening. Episodes are released every other week. If you enjoy The Teacher As... please rate it on Apple podcasts and leave a review, it helps the podcast reach more educators. Thanks for listening.
Melissa Milner 0:41
I had the pleasure of having a long chat with college professor and homeschooler Dr. Claire Honeycutt. We talked about a lot of different educational topics. To avoid this episode being an hour and 15 minutes long, I split it up into two parts. This main episode is about group work. It includes discussions about learning objectives, building relationships, standards, content, and student voice and choice. The other part of this chat will be available as a bonus episode eventually and it will most likely be about Claire's approach to homeschooling her two young children. You can go to the episode 79 page of theteacheras.com to get Claire's contact information, and also see the transcript for the show. In addition, on my website, you'll find the guest blog post that Claire wrote to accompany this episode. It is about using psychology based strategies to increase engagement and intrinsic motivation in the classroom. Here's my chat with Claire, enjoy.
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 1:44
It'd be interesting to get your opinion on this as well. So speaking of group work, so one of the things that I found, you know, at the college level, is the students, you know, we'll put them in these groups, and they're supposed to accomplish, you know, a particular project. And as they go through that project, you know, not all of them are achieving the same learning objectives, right? Because like, they'll be like, well, you write the code, and you put the figures together, and you whatever. And, and the faculty always get really upset about this. And they said, and they're like, well, the groups are not functioning properly. I was like, no, actually, that's a really highly functional group, in the real world a functional group would not have everyone doing the same thing. They would divide and conquer, and that's appropriate, and that's efficient, and do what they're good at. But if our learning objective is that everybody learned the same things, then we have to restructure the way, the way we're designing the curriculum and the way we're designing group work. And so it's a different these are ongoing issues, but it just we can't penalize students for for doing something that's only logical and is natural to them. And, and also not just natural to them, but a skill that they would want to have in the real world.
Melissa Milner 2:53
That's interesting. I do know, like when we do group work, like I set it up, so that there will be times where I'll say, everybody, just look at this together and discuss it together. Then there'll be other times where I'll say, if you want to split up the work, go for it.
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 3:11
Well, it depends on what again, it depends on what your learning objective is, if you're, if the learning objective is like, we want them to be able to work in groups, and you know, you know, divide, you know, create, project manage, right, that's it, that's a different skill set than saying, I want all the students that come out of this lab to be able to perform data analysis using this particular tool, right, like MATLAB or R or...
Melissa Milner 3:34
Right. And if only one kid's doing that in the group, they not all getting that. Yeah.
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 3:39
Right. But But yeah, so but then there has to happen in the discussion. And so one of you know, one of the things, you know, I know that I'm sure K through 12 certainly has classroom sizes that are too large. We're there even a whole other level level of too large, right. So, you know, I've had classrooms of 120 students, and so, you know, what is it what, you know, when you have that size, you know, how are you ensuring that all of the students are achieving the same learning objectives, particularly if you're doing group work.
Melissa Milner 4:10
I have 19 and I'm, you know...
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 4:13
Well, yeah, but 19 fourth graders, right. 19 fourth graders, you know. I think it's beautiful, this... the smaller classrooms, I you know, I love you know, these small, little, you know, 10 to 12 students, I mean, what can you accomplish with 10 to 12 students.
Melissa Milner 4:28
Seriously, though, 70-80 students, like, my sister in law has the big lecture hall type courses as well. I don't know how you do it.
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 4:39
Well, I'm gonna we can talk about that. I mean, I can tell you what, what I do, um, to varying levels of effectiveness. I think, you know, I mean, you have to have individual assessments on top of group assessment, right? So you have to have them actually say, you know, you're going to do this in a group and you're going to submit this group report, but then you also are going to have to take this test that indicates that you have made progress on these different things. But But I, you know, I'm also a big believer in driving intrinsic motivation through psychological principles. So, you know, we try, you know, I'm interested in principles of persuasion from Robert Cialdini is actually considered kind of the guru of this. And he's got a really cool book called Influence. And it's not specific to education, but I tried to take those pieces and meld them towards education. So we talk a lot about, you know, trying to build, there's like different tricks that you can use in the classroom to build relationships between yourself and the students as well, and the relationships between the students and the students like, so peers. And, you know, we can use that a lot. Because if you've done any group work, you know, you know that those groups sometimes don't work great together, they tend to fall apart. Every, every semester, there's somebody falling apart. And so trying to there's things that you can do to ensure that, that that's less likely to occur. So So one of the principles of persuasion is liking. So liking is is what do we have in common? And ideally, the more more specific you have in common are the more unusual you have in common with somebody, the closer you are bonded to that person right away. So, you know, for you and I, right, we're both in education, we build education, we both have cats, right? We have, you know, we have pedagogy that's in common. So we, we are ready before we even started talking had certain things in common and, and because of that, we were already kind of bonded, right? Does that make sense? If if we were from the same, you know, place, so when I meet a homeschooling family, because that's somewhat unusual, it's like, oh, we're gonna be best friends. And right, yeah, you know, so there are these, you know, these these these specific things. So one of the things I do in my classroom is on the first day, I tell them a bunch of random facts about myself. And then I say, and then you have to find something that we have in common, you and me. And I make them do that with their own group, as well. And it's surprising how effective it is, at just kind of solidifying that connection,
Melissa Milner 6:56
You have 70-80 kids, are you just randomly grouping them before you've met them? Like, how does this work?
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 7:02
So there's different pedagogy associated with that, as you know, the best way to do that is mixed ability learning, so that you are right, so that you're pairing, however you want to define it, someone that's, you know, top 25%, you know, bottom 25% In the middle two...50. So you've got kind of this spread, and there's a really cool paper. I can look it up. But anyway, he it's in it's in it's science. But anyway, he he demonstrated that when he did that, that all of the students improved. So all all the groups improve, but it narrowed the gap between the terminology he was using at the time was disadvantaged students, I think, probably modernize that language a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, but that was the term at the time. And, and, and so it narrowed that gap between the students that, you know, and so it's, you know, how do you how do you create a global education, right? So... And part of that was putting the... forming these groups with, you know, students that were struggling and students that weren't struggling? Students who were not struggling teach. And so you know, that you learn best by teaching. So they actually benefit too, everybody benefited. The whole classroom benefited, right, but it narrowed the gap and brought the students closer together, so it brings up instead of, right, so is it was a great is a really beautiful study. So ideally, you're doing that the students don't love that.
Melissa Milner 8:23
Walking in the first day, you don't know who's what level learner, do you?
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 8:30
Um, so that's where you get you get information from them from prior.
Melissa Milner 8:34
Okay. Yeah.
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 8:36
So that particular professor, he pulled it from their, they were freshmen. So he pulled like, the SAT scores or something. I don't remember what he used.
Melissa Milner 8:45
I was gonna say what do you use? Yeah.
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 8:47
He used something like prior GPA, and he sorted them that way. What I would do is, you know, because I teach sophomores, I can pull pull prior semesters' grades, and GPA and those kinds of things to help pick that up.
Melissa Milner 9:00
Cool. So you do... and then are they in the same group throughout the whole semester?
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 9:05
They have a little bit so I, I let them make those choices. I feel like it's not. I use something called nonviolent communication with students. That is Marshall Rosenberg kind of pioneered that. And it's really about talking about needs and feelings. So like I'm feeling this way, because my need for this isn't being met. So we have this kind of communication style with the students. But I also tell them, you know, if it's not working out, you're allowed to leave. You're allowed to leave. I don't say you're allowed to kick out somebody, but we do have a conversation. And then we we talk through those things. And if it if it doesn't, if it's not working, then it's not working. And then we help and I tell them that my job, I'm not on my job, I'm on all of their sides, like my job is to help every single one of them as successful as they possibly can be. And I do think that when I've had conversations with faculty about managing these group conflicts, a lot of times As the faculty are on the side of the of the side quote of the students who are like, well, he's not doing he or she is not doing their work, right. They're not they're not coming to class well, in a lot of everyone knows that usually that student is the one that's also not doing well on the exams or not doing coming to class. So it's not specific to that group. It's specific to the classroom. And I always say, the question is why, why? And I said, most of the time, you said, you talk to that student, because something really big is happening in their life. People don't just not their most, it's never they were lazy. It's like, Hey, I'm working a full time job and trying to go to school, or hey, you know, I'm working, I have this, you know, I'm, you know, I'm dealing with my anxiety issues, or I would have I have never spoken to the student, it was just like, I was just sitting around all day, I just wanted to go party with my friends. And that's never, that's never the answer. So, you know, I and I think it's important for students to know that like, people are, you know, that doesn't mean that their needs are not, their need is still important, I still have a need for someone to, for them to participate for them to be an active participant to be learning. So that need doesn't go away. And that need is still very valid, we also have to understand what's happening in that student in this other case, and when you go through that process with people and get them there, they just solve it, they feel it. And they and they respond differently. And they act differently.
Melissa Milner 11:15
Yeah.
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 11:15
And the vast majority of the times they, you know, it works itself out. And in the cases it doesn't, that I spend a lot of time with the student that's not there anymore, and not part of the group helping them helping them cross the finish line. And sometimes I think maybe that's better for them. Like, I feel like they get lots of extra one on one attention from myself, and usually undergraduate TAs who are supporting the system. So I don't know that that's exactly a bad outcome either.
Melissa Milner 11:40
Right. But you still have certain curriculum you are expected... content that you are expected to teach, right?
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 11:48
So the university system is a little bit more flexible, right? So I I've given a course. And there are ABET kind of requirements. So there's these, but it's much less, we have a lot more control over what we are teaching. It's not like I assume I assume you're at a public school, and they say, these are the these someone else on high, these are the things your students have to know, by the end of the year. It doesn't matter what they knew coming in, it doesn't matter who they are, as individuals, this is what they have to do these things, right. We have a lot less, you know, we as a department have a lot, we kind of decide that as a group, right? This is what we think our engineers should go in what fields and so on, so forth. So it's a little bit more flexible, that way interesting. And even even the same class will be taught slightly different. Well, depending on who's teaching the class, I teach my classes very differently than a lot of faculty, you might imagine. But you know, and I even let my students pick some of the lectures that, you know, like a bucket, the truth is, you can't possibly cover the whole of human physiology in a semester. So you know, there's some, like, we're definitely to do the heart redoubling into the brain, like going to do some of these systems, but some of the systems we just, we can, and then I and then I think it's really important that they know that sleeps really important. So I like I throw in a lecture on sleep. And so I let them have they still have some choices within the classroom. But we have a lot more say.
Melissa Milner 13:12
Cool.
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 13:12
Flexibility.
Melissa Milner 13:13
That's good.
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 13:13
And I love to hear like, maybe maybe you can't talk about this. But I'd love to hear like if you had more if you got to have more say and what your students were learning and what the objections were, what do...
Melissa Milner 13:23
I you would love that?
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 13:24
What might you change?
Melissa Milner 13:25
I would it would really be very student centered? You know, I would I would I mean, fourth, fifth grade level, I think this would work, I would say, here are the things we need to learn that we're being told we need need to learn these standards, in reading, writing, math, you know, how do you want to learn them? What things fascinate you? You know, and that might be interest groups. That's how we group is by interest groups. And, and, you know, there's still going to be time where I pull kids to help them with, you know, where they're struggling and reading, there's still going to be all that direct instruction one on one instruction, but then they're working on their stuff that like their passion project.
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 14:11
Yeah. When you talk to other faculty or other teachers about these kinds of things, do you get pushback on those kinds...? The reason I say this is because you know, the way I run, what you're saying is described, it's very much the way it kind of I run the laboratory part of my class. And it's like, my, the objective is that you need to be able to learn how to do human experimentation, right? And what that looks like, and all the different details of that, but, but what you can kind of study almost anything you want with it, you know, obvious safety bounds and things like that. But, but so let them run free, like what are you excited about, like run forth, but it is more time consuming on my part, to do it that way.
Melissa Milner 14:48
Right.
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 14:49
Because I need to, I have to work through these things. And so a lot of times the faculty will just say, Oh, that sounds really hard. I'm just gonna have them all do the same thing. Like that's just easier. So do you get a lot of pushback in that way or...?
Melissa Milner 15:01
I wouldn't, I wouldn't call it pushback. We, the fourth grade team discussed it. And it's our first year with the curriculum. So we all agreed, kind of, let's go through it the way they've structured it. And then we'll see what we like what we don't like and tweak. And I absolutely agreed with that, like, you know, I've got to give it... The other thing is this curriculum, it's not really a curriculum, it's a framework. And I was very excited to hear the district calling it a framework, because then that does give me the teacher, you know, my best teacher choices, to say, this didn't work for the kids, this worked great for the kids, this didn't work for the kids, and we need to tweak it. So I think because it's a framework, you know, and the person who comes to train us, she's like, Yeah, do it that way that, you know, she's says it's fine. You know? So it's a framework, as long as you're doing this, this and this, you know, the district says, these are things, you know, make sure you've done this, make sure you make sure that this is this, and you do that, but then you can kind of, yeah.
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 16:07
Well, I love that message. I know, messaging, and I, and I'd love your thoughts, it from an outsider to K through 12, it feels like to me that if the if the student... teachers, right, but I think faculty, if the teachers are set, you know, it's like, this is our framework, we would like the students to know X, Y, and Z, by the end of the year, however you get there, we're happy, you know, and I feel that teachers would just have autonomy, I would be on how to get there. Because the thing is, is that not all teachers, we talked about how all not all students are the same, but not all teachers are the same. And the way they interact with kids is going to look different from the way you know, like, some teachers are gonna be better. Some teachers are not going to do great with student directed learning the way you know that the way that you're describing it, but some teachers might, they might have a different skill. Maybe they really like active learning, and they're just really better at creating projects that work for, you know, multitude of kids, you know, maybe they're just maybe they're just better at creating projects. You know, I, you know, and there's lots of different ways to learn. And I just wonder if if you felt, I mean, obviously, it sounds like you would love that idea. Do you think that that would work better if we if we said to teachers, this is the framework of generally, and maybe even it's within school, you made the decision.
Melissa Milner 17:21
I've been saying it for years. It's also it's not just, you know, kids are different teachers are different, but also groups together, like you get a group one year, and they love this is kind of, so I had a group that loved to write, and they wanted to write a play and perform it. And I have a theater background. And I'm like, You guys could write a play, we could do it. And they wrote the entire play, and performed it and had, you know, classes come in to watch it. The next year. I didn't have a bunch of kids that were passionate about writing. So I said, Do you want to put on a play, they all wanted to put on a play. They didn't want to write it. So I pulled a really cute play. And they were like, can we write commercials because it was built sort of as like a TV. It was the tortoise and it was a funny version of tortoise and hare. And I said, Well, this is built sort of like, like a news, you know, when there's a sports cast, and then there's commercials Do you guys want to write the commercials, and they were jazzed about that. So they wrote the commercials. So it depends on the group you have. So you know, I love birds. And I can teach every piece of my standards, everything on the report card, I could teach it through through birds, every single every single thing, especially adaptations, and from from day one, I'm like, why can't we do birds, like birds is everything. To me, too, but but the point is, it doesn't matter what I'm into, you gotta see what your what each class is into the individuals. But then you're gonna find these groups, like the like, the kids are always we do a podcast and the kids are usually jazzed about the podcast. But every year, the podcast is completely different. Because you have a different group of kids. They want to do job junction, and they want you to different segments, and they come up with new segments. And every year we we end up with new segments. And what I'm describing is a lot of work because each year you're doing something different. And I get that, but I love that. That's why I went into teaching I wanted I want to bring out the passions of each kid. You know, my principal, my former principal was like, that's your thing. Like that's why you teach is you help each kid shine, you find a way for each kid to shine. And I thought that's that should be something that we have time to do in our day in our school day. And we don't always we don't always have time for that.
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 19:58
I think that's beautiful. It reminds me a lot of, you know what the unschooling community says right there, they're really big into, like, letting their kids find their passions and then helping them. You know, a lot of the kids are doing, like running their own little businesses, when they're in middle school, I listened to the, you know, it's really, I listen to a lot of these. I'm very interested to homeschooling kids with unschooling kids, where do they end up? What do they end up doing? So I listen to a lot of these podcasts of like, you know, adults who have have had this kind of background. And one of them talked about how she thought she wanted to be a vet. And so she, her parents actually did the thing, they moved up to a farm. And then she was like, close, she was working with this, like, local farmer or whatever, and the local vet and stuff. And she said, she figured out before she was in high school, that she was like, You know what, I thought that being a vet was hanging out with animals all day, but it's hanging out with sick animals every day. And she was like, I decided that was not what I wanted to do. And so she had gone down this completely different path. And it was like an architecture or something, or some such. But she said, she's like, if I hadn't had my parents, let me do that, would I have ended up being a veterinarian, you know, having had, you know, four years of a degree plus a post degree and, and then like, figured out when I was, you know, 26, or whatever, after I had all this debt, that I didn't really want to be a vet, you know, and I think a lot, you know, I think a lot about that for our students, you know, you know, with the college students, and a lot of them, you know, have never had any really chance, little chance to...what is it that you really want to do? What is it that you really want? What, you know, what passions Do you have, so I love that, you know, your your students are getting that in your classroom, you know, it's as much as you're able to provide it for them. I know, you'd love to give it to more of them, but at least you're trying, you know, and I, you know, and I think I think that if they had more teachers, like you go through the system, you know, when they come up to my classroom and says, What are you interested in, they might have an idea. And some of them do. My personal experience is that if you put interesting things in their path and interesting ways they're interested in it.
Melissa Milner 21:57
Right.
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 21:57
Like, so if I just say, Hey, what are you interested in? They don't know what to say. But if I, you know, I'm my grad class this semester, I'm basically just running it as a discussion group. And I said, What are you good, I was like, and I was like, I'm gonna put all this stuff on the floor, add stuff. And I was like, we could talk about sleep, we can talk about fasting, we can talk about, you know, and I just went through, like, all the things, I even put homeschooling on there, and parenting, and that actually, like, that got a couple of different, got some votes. And I was surprised, I was like, really you wanna talk about this. Okay. But, but we'll do it. And, and so the idea that, but they, but they have been just really excited to talk about these things. You know, it's because a lot of times, it's not been in their path, right. And so I think that if you can provide things and provide them in interesting ways, and talk, talk off of the, you know, this is the, this is the things we're supposed to do, right? We're supposed to do these, you have to learn how to do word problems, you have to be able to read this, this book, or whatever, if you can talk about this, like, like you're talking about doing a podcast, or putting on a play or doing these other things, I think kids will get interested in it. And in different ways as you as you described, right? Like, maybe it's going to look a little different every year, but who cares? That's great. It should.
Melissa Milner 23:06
Yeah. And also, that exposure, that the another piece of that exposure is, as you're describing it, it reminds me of like, genre, like kids come in, they're like I only read fantasy books. By the end of the year, they're interested in other books, because they pick read alouds from different genres. And I tried to pick like the best one of fantasy or the best one of historical fiction, the best, you know, and then I, of course, when I read, I'm performing with voices and all that, but when they're done, they're like, I actually like that genre. Okay, I have to find books that I like when I said, you're gonna like any genre, if it's a good story, and then we then we flip it and say, so how are you going to be a good author? So that whatever genre, you know, when you just move it to the, to the writing part, so what did you like about this, but you know, and, and all that. So, that exposure, if you don't expose them to different genres, they're not going to learn that they like them.
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 24:06
And I love this, like, self expression thing. So and I love that you're talking about that and that way, I think that so one of the Montessori ones is when my kids were at Montessori school, they were like, little boxes really ticked for, you know, they learned these things, and one of the ones was, can express themselves through art. And I, I love and I'm like, Yes, and I was like, and so now it's like, I want them to be able express themselves through art, you know, being you know, physical, you know, actual, you know, drawing and that kind of stuff, but also music also, you know, writing, you know, the art form, right. And so I want them to really express themselves. And there's so many beautiful ways to do that. And I love that you're talking but you know, it starts with showing them what, what it can be like and that there's these different genres right? And then,
Melissa Milner 24:49
Yeah, like you said, you wrote you wrote all those things down and they were things they wouldn't have even thought of...
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 24:56
Right.
Melissa Milner 24:57
Good stuff. It's good stuff. Well, we could talk all night obviously.
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 25:01
I feel like we could, Melissa. I know it's later for you than for me.
Melissa Milner 25:03
Thank you so much.
Dr. Claire Honeycutt 25:07
Thank you so much. It was so nice to get to... I love just getting to talk to people and connecting with everybody. And so it's awesome. Thank you for doing this and putting out a great podcast and bringing all these people together.
Melissa Milner 25:18
For my blog, transcripts of this episode, and links to any resources mentioned, visit my website at www.theteacher as.com You can reach me on Twitter and Instagram @melissabmilner and I hope you check out The Teacher As... Facebook page for episode updates. Thanks for listening. And that's a wrap.