The Stories of Oscar, Luis, & Levander: How and Why We Learn in Groups

It seemed like a lost cause trying to prep these middle school boys for a state mandated standardized test that was only weeks away. The school was at the bottom of every measure of academic effectiveness, the environment within its walls was jungle chaos, and we met for only a half hour twice a week. How could these kids from poor families, many of them immigrants without fluency in English, find the motivation or even concentration to learn or succeed?

Still, we were stuck together, tutor and boys. The school was paying a cadre of tutors in the hopes (or pretense?) of improving the scores of their poorest performers. The bell rang, and my previous group dumped themselves into the three-minute flood to their next seat in another room. I walked past the armed guards who patrolled the halls and monitored all bathroom activity, to pick up the boys whose names were on my clipboard schedule. My Tuesday/Thursday seventh graders were in the annex where the level of mayhem and inattention swelled to a din in the five minutes between door closings. Teachers shouted at individuals and at the group, to no effect.

I rounded them up, and we “sauntered”, a vocabulary word in the upcoming test, to the library, the boys’ goal to make the transition as slow as possible. Finally, at our table in the corner, amongst all the other groups, the boys squabbled over pencils and erasers that were fully functional. Another two minutes gone. The assignment in front of them for the next week was to write a personal narrative essay on the subject “How We Learn in Groups.” They had rubrics about word count, hooks, active verbs, structure, all attached to scored outcomes. For instance, if you were missing lively language, or a thesis statement, you would lose a certain number of points. So much structure placed in front of them and not a clue what was being asked.

I have no idea how these boys fared on the test, but the stories they produced, well, that I dragged out of them, are insightful, and a lesson to us all. With intense focused questioning from me, one at a time, some understanding emerged for them and for me. These three guys managed to plunk a plot into the expected structure, but the real magic happened when we talked about Why This Matters. If you think about it, nobody is going to learn, or share what they know, unless it matters. Once each boy had identified why his learning or teaching experience mattered to HIM, his writing took on a poignancy that brought tears to my eyes.

Oscar (all names changed to protect privacy) was not big for his age, but his face was as tough as a Marine’s. He wasn’t one of the loud troublemakers in the library – his resistance was internal. He confessed to me, “Miss, I am a bully.” After extensive questioning, it turns out he spends his time at home playing a war-based role playing game, a multi-player team based, online, worldwide game. Anyone, from anywhere could join together on a team, and English speaking was not a requisite skill. I latched on to this situation as Oscar’s group learning experience.

This small kid was engaged in life and death simulation that utterly depended on skill and knowledge sharing to succeed. He was playing with unknown teammates and yet they had to trust and exchange information. Oscar voiced it, “ We don’t teach each other to be nice, we teach each other because we want to win.” He was stunned that I thought this an outstanding example of group learning. Personally, I think Oscar could be the kind of man who would succeed in the toughest business environments.

Luis loafed along, a little behind the rest of us three on our saunter to the library. His responses, accompanied by a shrug, were invariably, “ I dunno.” His survival technique at this school seemed to be to stay out of the fray and remain non-committal. It finally came out that he did indeed engage in a group activity. His dad would come by now and then and take him to learn basketball with the group of guys he played with. Each man had his distinctive personality and expertise on the court. Luis said, “and one of them was gay!” The men were teaching this boy how to be a man. They were showing him, in the context of basketball, how men relate to one another cooperatively in a social context. Luis could see that. He wrote, “ I learn how to be a man from older guys.” Luis will find his place when he’s older, when he won’t be afraid to voice who he is.

Levander wears a huge smile and doesn’t seem afraid to let his heart show, which is extraordinary in a seventh grade boy. He produced his narrative easily, and it didn’t take much prompting for him to figure out why it matters. He said that on his first day of organized basketball practice, he had showed up in a football jersey, not a basketball one, and was jeered at by the other players. The coach had quickly given him a basketball jersey, and some other kid demonstrated the essentials of dribbling. Levander now takes special note of newcomers and makes sure they experience a smooth entry into the practices. He said, “I know what it’s like to be the geeky new guy.” Levander understands empathy and will be a good leader one day because of it.

So, our little group did some learning in that unpromising environment after all. The boys figured out that their life stories have some value to themselves, and to others. Whether the person who gives their test essays a thirty-second read can detect these young men of promise is a long shot. What I learned is that it takes enormous one-to-one energy to overcome the deficits of a chaotic learning environment, a lack of language skills, and other socio-economic factors that make it almost impossible to wrest oneself from poverty. The boys themselves wrote that learning motivation comes from wanting to win, emulating elders, and empathy. These emotions are what we need to tap into, early, and personally. Depending on the goodwill and zeal of tutors is not a strategy, it’s an excuse.

Who has that kind of energy to put into a kid’s learning? Maybe the parents. It struck me that if the money spent on middle school tutors a few weeks before a test were diverted into a program in which immigrant parents could learn English by reading to their pre-school children, some of the deep disadvantages would be better addressed, and the clutch of illiteracy and poverty treated more efficiently.