Group cooperation, inclusion and disaffected pupils: some responses to informal learning in the music classroom

Written version of RIME paper (GCID) for MER, Exeter 2007

-Sandra: ... I think their group work, and working as a team in a positive way
has improved a lot. I haven’t seen anybody arguing in the same way that you
quite often get with kids, ‘Oh, that instrument, Oh I don’t want to do that’.
They seem to have chosen an instrument and stuck to it and it’s been accepted
that that’s what they’re doing. And there has been a huge amount of positive
encouragement between the students, so students who are naturally good at
this are jumping in to help others, and they’re helping others with their own
parts, and they’re helping others by playing to them and demonstrating what to
do, and it’s been, it’s been really interesting to watch that come out. Whereas
ordinarily I think people tend to just play their bit and then go off task and
have a big fight over who’s doing what, and not always work as positively in a
group as they have done with this.

The cooperative learning group as an organic system

What are the reasons why the groups cooperated and organised themselves in ways
that helped their learning? One reason concerns motivation. I do not have time to go
into this today, but I hope it will suffice to say that most pupils found the task highly
motivating. However much they were or were not enjoying their music lessons before
the project started, they also found the project quite different and unexpected. ‘We’ve
never done anything like this before’. Over two years, across 17 of the schools, 95 per
cent of pupils reported they preferred the project’s approach to the ‘normal’
curriculum. In addition, we and the teachers observed many signs which suggested
that enjoyment was high. For example, one was that pupils played together without
stopping for lengthy periods of up to 6 or 7 minutes, during which they often appeared
to be experiencing a state of ‘flow’, as identified by the psychologist
Csikszentmihalyi (1990, 1996). They also appeared to be involved in ‘play’ rather
than ‘work’, as identified by J. S. Bruner (1979).

Pupils themselves affirmed these claims in their interviews, again without
being prompted. They frequently and spontaneously described the project as ‘fun’.
They told us that they very much liked having choice. This included not only choice
over music and instruments, but moreover, choice over the learning strategies.
Overall, the majority preferred directing their own learning - with help from teachers

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