Working on Learning Circle Investigations

This phase of the Learning Circle interaction is very exciting. Your students will be very eager to see the responses to their information request. Participation in the investigations conducted by the other classrooms can also greatly enhance your students' learning. Successful investigations will take some facilitation by all of the teachers in the Learning Circle. Hopefully you will be able to send at least one contribution from your site to each of the other class investigations conducted in your Learning Circle. You and your students can help make each investigation a success!

Course Activity:

Respond to the information requests from your Learning Circle partners. In each response you must include both your class number and the class number of the information to which you are responding. For example, if you are Class1 and you are responding to Class 5, then your e-mail will have the subject line:

Class 1 response to Class 5

Organizing Responses in the Classroom

The size of your Learning Circle has been designed to ensure a comfortable and diverse working environment for you and your students. We have found that groups of 7-9 classrooms are large enough to provide diverse perspectives on a project, yet intimate enough to encourage regular exchange.

It is important to remember that the message exchange occurs among classrooms, not between individual students. Since each Learning Circle includes over 200 students, sending individual messages to each other every week would result in mail overload.

Surveys
In investigations with surveys, it is helpful to send a class response rather than have each student respond separately. If each student sent a separate survey response, there would be over 200 surveys for one classroom to compile! Here are some ideas for collecting survey data for Learning Circle investigations.

When students are asked specifically to share their personal views, you will be faced with two important decisions:

• How many messages should you send?
• How should you select them?

It is wise not to send a large number of responses on the same topic. While students are initially excited to receive mail, they soon lose interest if they read response after response with similar content. If you send only the "best" responses, many students may feel as if they failed and will find little motivation to polish their work. All of your students need to feel involved in the message exchange.

Organizing your classroom response to involve each student in at least one Learning Circle investigation can ensure the success of all projects sponsored in your Circle. Incorporate cooperative learning strategies in the classroom can make your Learning Circle experience more successful.

Analyzing Requested Information
You and your students will need to develop strategies for recording, examining, and summarizing the information that you requested. Students can help plan how they will save, store, and compare the messages. If they asked all sites to collect data or respond to a number of questions, it is not always informative to just list all the responses by each site.

Students may want to compare the responses from all sites to a single question. Sometimes grouping schools with similar responses will help students understand the relationships.

There is no way to provide the perfect format for the presentation of the different types of information you will be collecting. The important thing is to help students think about how to best process the information and explore what they have learned from collecting the information. This last step is essential. Here are some ideas on how to organize this in the classroom.

Evaluation Strategies
The goal of these strategies is to help students learn how to evaluate information received from partner classes. The role of the teacher is to help students learn the importance of constructive evaluation. For example, if a student says, "I think this information should be rejected because I don't like it," the teacher needs to help the student specify what features led to that overall assessment. The the student should be encouraged to think about the reason that led to the assessment. Was the article poorly written, badly organized, or just not informative? Was there too much or not enough information? As students begin to form evaluation standards to apply to the contributions of others, they also begin to apply these same criteria to their own writing. This is the real value of the evaluation process.

The most important outcome of this analysis and evaluation is not simply to identify good and bad information, but to recognise how this information can add value to your class investigation.

Course Activity:

Organise, evaluate and analyse the reponses that you received and prepare your findings to your investigation

Responsible Team Work

It is likely that you and your students will enjoy the challenge of most, or all, of your Learning Circle's investigations. It is possible that one of the information request may not capture your students' interest. It may be too difficult, request information that they cannot find, or you may judge the content not to be age appropriate or too controversial. You can help your Circle partners by finding participants from another class. Another option might be for you to write a short response yourself. By signing up as a participant or finding someone outside of the class to respond to an information request not appropriate for your students, you make clear your commitment to help all of the investigations in your Learning Circle.

If, for some reason, there will not be a response from your site for one or more of the projects, please let the other class(es) know as soon as possible. It is not fair to your partners to keep them waiting for a work that will not be coming. It is important to let others know both what level of response to expect from your site and when they can expect to receive it.

Learning to work in teams is an important work skill. Help your students to understand that others are depending on them and they are depending on others. In any team, there is usually a weak link, someone who is unable to do as much as others had hoped. What happens in this situation? What makes a productive team from one that falls apart? What does it mean to call a group a team? Helping students to understand productive and nonproductive strategies is part of the learning that takes place in this unique environment. When faced with a non-productive team member what strategies are likely to improve the situation? What strategies are likely to lead to a worse team outcome?

Learning Circles are created by the interactions of everyone in the team. Successful Learning Circles are incredible experiences in group cooperation and teamwork.

Go to phase 5

Adapted for ASEAN Schoolnet from Learning Circle Teachers' Guide by Margaret Riel