Keith Sawyer's ideas on collaboration/improvisation overlap nicely with Kenneth Bruffee's ideas on collaborative learning. Sawyers basic premise is that teaching is performance and that it should not be focused on a crystallized pedagogical model but instead should arise collaboratively and in the vein of improvisation. Sawyer returns the teacher to the conversation, like butter on popcorn. Bruffees premise is that although collaborative learning may be fraught with some logistical concerns, it is an extremely effective way of creating fresh and original knowledge in a classroom. His work is a response to the idea that students are failing where they should succeed and that the collaborative model answers some of these important questions.
He returns to the idea of conversation being a substantial element of learning.
Bruffee begins with an historical example of the beginnings of collaborative learning which started in the medical field with the studies of Abercrombie and asserts that "successful (medical) practice is better learned in small groups of students arriving at diagnoses collaboratively than it is learned by students working individually."
This is well mirrored by Sawyer in most of his ideas though he also grounds his framework in improvisation. He posits the idea that "scripting" in teaching is something that stifles creativity and that it leads to the teaching of and emphasis on "lower order skills" while teachers who advocate what he calls "creative teaching argue that it results in deeper understanding among learners" He says that experienced teachers rely on improvisation as well as scripting adapting themselves to what he calls "disciplined improvisation" and that they adapt their skills and perfomances to the individual classroom environment.
This might be one possible solution to some of the problems that Bruffee mentions with collaborative learning: "many teachers are are unsure about how to use collaborative learning and about when and where, appropriately, it should be used." He goes on to say that sometimes it "works beyond my highest epectations. Sometimes it doesn't work at all."
If we take Sawyers concept of "disciplined improvisation" which must necessarily be a part of collaborative learning we might find that "teachers locally improvise within an overall global structure."
Because anything that happens in collaboration can only be scaffolded and facilitated, there will always be an unpredictable, organic and improvisational character to the learning that goes on in this type of teaching. Benefits of collaboration take off on the idea that comes from Vygotsky and others, that human beings learn best in groups and learn through conversation. Collaborative learning harnesses this potential. Or should I say that it potentially harnesses this potential...
Not to trope on this again but, this little loop then leads back again to the advantages of improvisation which has a gentle structure behind it, it creates a "scene" and perhaps the teacher then creates the "attitude" of the improvisation. But the other elements of the Pentad reveal themselves creatively, taking the emphasis off of the lone teacher at the top of the room, spouting discourse on the vertical axis and instead expandings the discourse horizontally and creatively in potentially dynamic ways. Collaborative learning has the potential to strike a nice balance between teacher centered and student centered classrooms. There also exists an idealism in it which expresses the possibility of new meaning making, new discourses being birthed and group thinking which could in then inform the individual thinking in a class.
I could go on.. There are problems associated with it as well, a danger on it dumbing down the student population, a danger in the lack on content, a danger in an overarching group think not allowing for individual ideas to flourish. I think the hope here, or at least for Sawyer, is that a teacher would be on hand to help the conversation to flow smoothly and in a meaningful way.
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