Designing collaborative learning contexts

The relationship of the strategies to the process of developing an intersubjective attitude became clear early in the RT research program. Initially, rather than beginning the dialogues with questions of the text, followed by summaries, clarifications, and predictions, students were first invited to clarify what they found confusing. Typically, they would identify isolated "hard words." This led to a fragmentation of the text and of the conversation, with the teacher being viewed as the sole authority in the group and the translator of difficult words. When the order of the strategies was transposed, the participant structure changed to the extent that there was a sharing of the process of making sense of the text. Furthermore, it was determined that "hard words" were actually less problematic, and the focus turned to the bigger ideas that had emerged in the course of generating questions and summarizing the text.

An additional feature of RT that promotes the development of an intersubjective attitude is the expectation that every participant in the group will be responsible for leading the dialogue and will receive the assistance necessary to do so. As a form of collaborative learning, we have been intrigued with students' ability to provide assistance for one another. For example, in the process of helping a peer address a confusion in the text, students construct metaphors drawing upon action heroes, computer games, song lyrics, and other contemporary popular media about which adults may know very little.

The nature of the problem. The nature of the problem clearly influences the activity of constructing meaning and promoting opportunities for attaining consensus. In RT, the nature of the problem is defined both by the demands of the text as well as the purposes for reading the text. The relationship between the problem and the demands of the text became quite clear to us when we introduced RT teaching at the first-grade level. At this level we were confronted with the challenge of finding text that was suitable. The types of text available to young students often place a priority on controlling the vocabulary or rendering the text highly predictable. While these are important attributes, when the goal is to enable young students to read with fluency, they are not necessarily attributes that lend themselves to rich conversation. Hence, rather than use text that was designed to support independent reading, we turned instead to children's periodicals that had short informational articles and engaging narratives with interesting plot structures (e.g., surprise twists) that were read aloud by the teacher.

The nature of the problem is also a function of how the text is being used. One use is simply to figure out what the text is about, and in the initial studies of RT this was the primary purpose. Students read disconnected texts and little reference was made across texts. A second use of the text is to enhance one's understanding of a specific topic or domain of knowledge. For example, the RT dialogues with the first graders (Palincsar, Brown, & Campione, 1993) were used to learn simple science concepts related to animal survival themes, such as protection from the elements and protection from enemies through camouflage and mimicry. These themes were represented across the texts used in the dialogues and gave rise to interesting outcomes. For example, there were now opportunities for students to bring the shared knowledge they were developing to the dialogues. There were multiple occasions for referencing earlier texts and discussions. In addition, there was greater clarity regarding the purposes for discussing the meaning of the text to the extent that the students and teachers focused more of the discussions on how new information in the stories was advancing what students already knew about the topic at hand.