Principles of Learning in the Context of a "Learning Community" 

Active learning

Deliberate meta-cognitive layer

•  metacognitive environment to increase learners' ownership in setting goals, leading discussions, and selecting learning resources is of paramount importance (Brown & Campione, 1990; Brown & Campione, 1996).
•  Metacognition leads students to become highly aware of how they learn and to be able to make necessary modifications to achieve desirable learning outcomes through self-reflection, critical inquiry, and controlling the learning environment (Brown, 1992). To achieve this goal, students should become co-designers of their learning experiences and approach the learning task as researchers. The community of learner's perspective, though, advises against partially relinquishing the responsibility of learning to students. Teachers will still guide the process (Brown, 1992; Brown & Campione, 1994; Brown & Campione, 1996). Becoming aware of how they learn, students can flexibly use their knowledge in novel situations. In a community of learners, however, application of metacognitive skills transcend individual students to the whole class as a community, keeping student responsible for monitoring and, if necessary, correcting their peers (Brown & Campione, 1994). This notion ties into "diversity of expertise" and "sustaining a community of discourse", two other principles of learning that are explained below.

Distributed expertise

In a community of learners expertise is distributed among the students, the teacher, and experts form outside of the classroom (Brown & Campione, 1990). Each member of the learning community is knowledgeable is some aspect of the curricula, or is a cognitive apprentice (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989) who is moving toward that direction in a continuum of expertise. The community of learners perspective proposes modified roles not only for students, but also for teachers and the experts coming outside of the classrooms. Learning procedures should aim at fostering the collective expertise in the community (Brown & Campione, 1994).

In a classroom that pursues to become a community of learners, students reach various levels of expertise based on their interest in the topic (Brown & Campione, 1990). At any level, students are acknowledge for what they know and are held responsible, at least partially, for identifying their learning needs, setting goals, and identifying necessary resources to accomplish the goals (Brown, 1992; Brown & Campione, 1994). To encourage students to develop and share expertise, it is possible to use methods such as Jigsaw that intentionally distributes the expertise on a theme among students so that they need to negotiate their individual knowledge in collaborative groups (Brown & Campione, 1994).

       Although boosting students agency is advocated for, maintaining a balance between teachers' and students accountability in the classrooms is a recurring theme in the community of learners literature (Brown, 1992). On one hand, teachers cease from their authoritative status in the classroom to, instead, guide learning and model critical thinking and methods of inquiry (Brown & Campione, 1990; Brown, 1992). On the other hand, they should develop a sound sense of judgment to differentiate among the sitiations when the students need help to avoid misconceptions, when they are ready to undertake more advanced topics, or where they should be left on their own (Brown, 1992; Brown & Campione, 1994).  Unlike traditional classrooms, teachers are not expected to know the answers to all questions; rather, they should become inquiry role models who are competent in identifying problem areas and can effectively locate and utilizing various sources of knowledge and expertise (Brown, 1992; Brown & Campione, 1994).

       Teachers, or in a broader sense content knowledge experts, are integral parts of the learning process. Without their support and monitoring, students are in the danger of developing misconceptions about the topic of inquiry or they would make minor progress after achieving certain degrees of expertise. Although teachers are the primary experts in the classrooms, they should connect the students to outside experts and broaden the spectrum of available expertise (Brown, and Campione, 1996). Necessary to fostering a culture of distributed expertise is the prevision of communication channels that facilitate members idea sharing and negotiations. The third characteristic of a community of learners deals with the importance of developing a shared discourse.

Supporting a community of discourse

Collaborative activities employed to foster communities of learners pursue one common objective: Engaging students in a shared discourse where they can share ideas, offer critical but constructive feedback, and ultimately become experts in scholarly discussions (Brwon & Collins, 1994). Collaboration and negotiation are fundamental component of community building through which the members develop a shared understanding of what the community, as a collective entity, aspires to achieve.
       The previous characteristic of a community of learners emphasized the distributed responsibility of acquiring and advancing the collective expertise. Communities of learners delegate the teaching responsibility to students and hold them accountable to communicate with their peers as clear and as cohesive as possible (Brown & Campione, 1994; 1996). Nevertheless, mastering such skills requires constant modeling and practice; in other words, enculturation strategies such as providing opportunities for students to have dialogues with content knowledge experts and with their peers should dominated the mode interaction in the classrooms(Brown & Campione, 1994; 1996).

Seeding generative ideas

 A community of discourse allows students, or novice members of the learning community, to suggest ideas and discuss them with their peers and with the experts. An important role for the experts is to enable students identify generative ideas that would be later taken up and acted upon by other members of the community (Brown, 1992; Brown & Campione, 1994);

Collaboration Scripts 

Collaboration is at the heart of learning communities but previous research has shown that students are less likely to know how to collaborate effectively. Therefore, collaboration scripts have been introduced to scaffold students and teachers activities in group settings. Brown and Campione (1994) argue that these structures can be eliminated once students become competent in leading and participating in discussions.

Reciprocal Teaching (RT)

• Designed to improve reading comprehension in underachieving students
• A tool that can be adapted and appropriated to enhance comprehension and acquire increasingly complex forms of argumentation and explanation strategies
•  Each member leads the discussion in turn
• Can be used in the beginning to generate questions
    
• Four strategies of RT:
  • Summarizing: To identify and integrate the most important information in the text. Text can be summarized across sentences, paragraphs, and the whole passage. In the initial phases of the reciprocal teaching procedure, students efforts are generally focused at the sentence and paragraph levels. As they become more proficient, they are able to integrate at the paragraph and passage levels.
  • Question generating: Qestions about the core content. einforces the summarizing strategy and carries the learner one more step along in the comprehension activity. . Question generating is a flexible strategy to the extent that students can be taught and encouraged to generate questions at many levels. For example, some school situations require that students master supporting detail information; others require that the students be able to infer or apply new information from text. When students generate questions, they:
    •  Identify the kind of information that is significant enough to provide the substance for a question
    • Pose this information in question form and self-test to ascertain that they can indeed answer their own question
  • Clarifying: Particularly important when working with students who have comprehension difficulty( May believe that the purpose of reading is saying the words correctly). When the students are asked to clarify, their attention is called to the fact that there may be many reasons why text is difficult to understand (e.g., new vocabulary, unclear reference words, and unfamiliar and perhaps difficult concepts). They are taught to be alert to the effects of such impediments to comprehension and to take the necessary measures to restore meaning (e.g., reread, ask for help).
  • Predicting: Students hypothesize what the author will discuss next in the text. Students must activate the relevant background knowledge that they already possess. The students have a purpose for reading: to confirm or disprove their hypotheses. Furthermore, the opportunity has been created for the students to link the new knowledge they will encounter in the text with the knowledge they already possess. The predicting strategy also facilitates use of text structure as students learn that headings, subheadings, and questions embedded in the text are useful means of anticipating what might occur next.

• Initially, the teacher is responsible for starting and sustaining the dialogs through modeling and thinking out loud. As students acquire more practice with the dialogs, the teacher consciously imparts responsibility for the dialogs to the students, while becoming a coach to provide evaluative information and to prompt for more and higher levels of participation.
• Evolution of RT (Brown & Campione, 1994)
  http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/students/learning/lr2recib.htm

http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/students/atrisk/at6lk38.htm

Palincsar, A.S. (1986). Reciprocal teaching. In Teaching reading as thinking. Oak Brook, IL: North Central Regional Educational Laboratory.

Palincsar, A.S., & Brown, A.L. (1985). Reciprocal teaching: Activities to promote read(ing) with your mind. In T.L. Harris & E.J. Cooper (Eds.), Reading, thinking and concept development: Strategies for the classroom. New York: The College Board.

Palincsar, A.S., & Klenk, L.J. (1991). Dialogues promoting reading comprehension. In B. Means, C. Chelemer, and M. S. Knapp (Eds.), Teaching advanced skills to at-risk students. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Jigsaw

• Curriculum themes
  • Subtopics → small groups
• Researching the assigned sub-topic
  • Forming jigsaw groups (RT)
    • One student from each sub-topic
  • Every one of students is responsible to learn the whole unit

Cross talk

• Students from different sub-topic group discuss their interim progress

Collaborative Reasoning

 Fundamental principles about education, teaching, and learning:

• The process of teaching and learning should be intellectually stimulating and personally engaging for all students.

• Teaching and learning is socially constructed---It is through the social interactions with others that we come to understand and make meaning about the world around us.

• An education imperative, regardless of the theory, practice, and approach, is to help students become more literate members in the society. The abilities to reason well, to make sound decisions, and to communicate effectively with others are critical for one to have a voice in the public discourse of the society.

Collaborative Reasoning projects range from basic research on the social and cognitive aspects of children's development of reasoning to designing educational environments that promote children's intellectual development as well as social participation skills. (http://csr.ed.uiuc.edu/CR/index.html)

Collaborative Reasoning

• The goal is to construct reasoned arguments about multi-faceted issues raised in the text.
• Students meet in heterogeneous groups of five to eight students.
• Assumes a critical/analytic stance. Students read and discuss the text-- Take position; dealing with ambiguities and opposing views; reasoning, exploring, evaluation and building of arguments; evaluate their own viewpoint in the light of the social context; challenge each other-  in order to come to a reasoned decision about a dilemma (the big issue)
• The teacher
  • Allows students to lead the discussion as independently as possible.
  • Does not know the right answer.
  • Models reasoning and positive social dynamics.
    • Prompting students for their positions and reasoning
    • Demonstrating reasoning processes by thinking aloud
    • Challenging students with countering ideas
    • Acknowledging good reasoning
    • Summing up what students have said
    • using the vocabulary of critical and reflective thinking
• Ideally, students have control over what to say and when to say it, control over the topic, and the interpretive authority to evaluate the ideas that are presented.

http://csr.ed.uiuc.edu/CR/index.html

Reznitskaya, A., Anderson, R. C., Dong, T., Li, Y., Kim, I., & So-young., K. (2008). Learning to think well: Application of Argument Schema Theory. In C. C. Block & S. Parris (Eds.), Comprehension instruction: Research-based best practices (pp. 196-213). Guilford Press: New York.

Jaddallah, M., Miller, B., Anderson, R. C., Nguyen-Jahiel, K., Archodidou, A., Zhang, J., & Grabow, K. (in press). Collaborative Reasoning about a science and public policy issue. In Margaret McKeown and Linda Kucan (Eds.) Threads of Coherence in Research on the Development of Reading Ability. New York: Guilford Publications.

Structured academic controversies

http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/archive/CL1/CL/doingcl/controv.htm 

Think-Pair-Share 

Fostering Communities of Learners (FCL) 

• Constructivist Instructional program
• Promote critical thinking and reflection skills underlying higher forms of literacy
• Student practice research like activities 
  • Requires support strategies

• Key elements coordinated by conscious reflection:
  • Research
  • Share expertise
  • A collective consequential task
  •  
  •  
  •  
    Brown & Campione (1996) 

Principles of Learning in FCL

• Generative ideas
  • Rooted in deep disciplinary content
  • Developing theories
• Systems and cycles
  • Research, share, perform
• Meta-cognitive environment
• Reflective discourse
  • Emergence of Individual/collective knowledge
• Deep content knowledge
• Distributed expertise
  • interdependence
• Guided inquiry, formative assessment
• Fostering a community of practice
•  

Role of Teacher

• Recognize generative ideas
• Designing collaboration scripts to support Deep thinking, interdependence and distributed expertise
• Negotiate norms of collaboration and membership in a learning community