Cohen 4-14

I found the Cohen article on groupwork to be very intersting, eye-opening, and true! I have personally experienced as a students and seen as a future teacher in my placements so many of the things Cohen listed as problems seen in groupwork. I found the studies on status order to be very interrelated to these problems in groupwork. For example. you almost never come across a group of four students that are each participating exactly 1/4 each. No matter what the age or subject area, there is always one student dominating and one or two students being totally excluded and forgotten about. The article points out that the dominate student more times than not is percieved by his/her peers and the teacher as a strong reader and/or good student. The article points out this is even the case for non-academic groupwork too, such as the game in the study Shoot the Moon. "It is clear that percieved academic or intellectual ability is, whether it is actually relevant to the task or not, has the power to affect both participation and influence in small groups of students." I would argue this is true for all ages in any profession or instance where people have group meetings. In addition to this academic status, peer status plays a huge role in classroom discussion and groupwork. Students develop peer status for one another as they interact everyday in and outside of the classroom walls. Among other things, peer status can depend on popularity, athletic competence, or attractiveness. Those who are ranked highest on the peer status spectrum are also more likely to dominate class discussions and groupwork. Moreover, societal status plays a large part too. For example high class people will dominate conversations more than low class people, whites will dominate over minorities in conversations, and males will dominate over females in conversations. This is not to say this always happens, however, it is a very likely trend we see in Western societies. So, how od we change this all? Here are some ideas, and Rose and Gabe I would love to hear what you think! I liked the multiple ability strategy which alters the expectations of students, so the teacher has created a mixed set of expectations for everyone. Students are all supposed to show their strengths and weaknesses that they bring to the new task. This helps bridge the gap of competence between low and high status students.