George M Jacobs works at the Kampung Senang Charity and Education Foundation, Singapore, where he teaches Communication, table tennis, and Sharing Selected Stories. He and Marla do a workshop for people of all ages, titled Writing for the Planet. Email: george.jacobs@gmail.com

Marla Lise endeavours to inspire others to venture outside the box and open their minds to the many exciting perspectives the world has to offer. She believes that education, soft skills, and language are essential to improve the state of the world and the people in it. She does this through her two companies, The English Curve, Singapore, and The Eco Chapter. Emails: marla.lise@yahoo.com.au  and learn@theenglishcurve.com

 

The use of group activities in second language (L2) education, as well as education generally, is supported by an extensive amount of theoretical, research, and practical work (Irkinovich, 2021; Johnson & Johnson, 2017). For instance, Long and Porter (1985) elaborated on five potential advantages of group activities for promoting second language acquisition. The first of these is increased opportunities to practice the target language. In contrast, instruction via teacher-fronted instruction, during which students sit alone while teachers spend most of class time talking, offers very limited opportunities for students to produce output in the language of instruction.

After this praise of the power of groups to dramatically increase student talk, readers might wonder why this article is extolling solitude within group activities by L2 students. While fully cognizant and highly appreciative of how groups can up student talk time, the article authors will provide three reasons why solitude has a role amidst the dynamic dialogue of L2 students:

1. The primary goal of groups lies not in group products but in the individual learning and gratification of each group member.
2. Effective groups put supportive pressure on their members to do their fair share toward achieving the group’s primary goal.
3. As group members interact, they strive to develop attitudes and language / social skills that contribute toward the group reaching their goal.

The remainder of the article elaborates on these three reasons.

 

Groups’ primary goal

 

When people think of groups, their minds picture groups such as orchestras and bands performing at a concert, sport teams taking part in a match, companies marketing products, and researchers working together to develop a cure for a disease. In these instances, the groups have a combined goal, a goal more important than the individual group members. For example, when business groups develop a pitch for their new product, their goal is to sell their product. Therefore, the best speaker in the group will do the speaking, and the member with the best design skills will design the pitch deck. Of course, the least skilled speaker will not speak, and the member with the weakest design skills will be hands-off at design time.

However, the goals of groups in education need to manifest a picture that differs in a 180-degree manner from that of typical groups. Yes, a group of students preparing a presentation for a class will strive to create and deliver a quality product, just as a group tasked with preparing a report endeavors to submit a product in accord with the rubrics set forth in their assignment. Product quality matters, but their primary goal lies elsewhere.

The primary goal lies in the learning of each of the group members. As a result, for instance, the member best at presentation design keeps their hands away from the mouse and keyboard when the group designs their presentation. Instead, that member should serve as coach for the others in the hope that the rest will rise to the coach’s level. What about those members who coach groupmates? Research suggests that they can benefit too, depending on how they coach.

How does a group’s focus on developing their individual members fit with this article’s emphasis on opportunities for each student to have time alone? First, alone does not have to mean physically alone. Students can be sitting together but concentrating on their own learning. Second, increased use of IT allows students to work alone wherever they are, save what they have done, and then share it and any questions / doubts with peers for whom IT affordances offer tools, time, and structure to provide feedback and guidance. Furthermore, in the particular case of L2 education, the internet provides language support to which group members less proficient in the target language can turn. Third, in the traditional group-product-as-goal thinking about groups, once one member – the group’s expert in that area – had finished, the group was done. But now, with the everyone-learns perspective, groups give everyone time to see what they can do on their own, with peer scaffolding.

 

Supportive pressure

 

While many theories of human interaction and learning provide insight into why and how group activities can promote learning and interpersonal harmony, perhaps the theory most relevant to this article is Social Interdependence Theory (Deutch, 1949; Johnson & Johnson, 2009). This theory explores what impacts people’s feelings toward others. Using the concept of correlation, the theory posits three possible ways that people might feel about their links with others. On an individual level, when people believe their outcomes are positively correlated with the outcomes of another, the theory labels that feeling as positive interdependence, i.e., what helps the other helps me, and what harms the other harms me.

Conversely, negative interdependence describes the feeling of negatively correlated outcomes, i.e., what helps the other hurts me, and what harms the other helps me. Finally, a feeling of no interdependence exists when people see no correlation between their own outcomes and the outcomes of another. The subjective nature of interdependence should be emphasized; whether the outcomes are objectively correlated is not the question.

Applied to education, a great deal of practical work has been done on how to facilitate students feeling positively interdependent with groupmates and others, as such a feeling increases the likelihood of success for group activities. Ways that educators might facilitate positive interdependence among student groups include:

1. Each group member has a unique role in the group, e.g., facilitator, keeping the group on track toward its goals, questioner, asking questions to promote deeper discussion and to check members’ understanding, and roster manager, attending to which group member will do which tasks by when. Roles rotate.
2. Each group member has one or more unique resources. Resources can be information, as in information exchange tasks (Tran, 2022), e.g., information about their own family, or physical resources, e.g., a pen of a particular color when a group is creating a multi-colored mindmap.
3. The group creates a common identity. This could involve a group logo, motto, cheer, slogan, mascot, name, flag, favorite song, etc.

At the same time that feelings of positive interdependence encourage group members to support each other, Social Interdependence Theory highlights a complementary force needed for successful groups: individual accountability, i.e., pressure on group members to do their fair share toward the group’s goal. Please note that fair share does not necessarily mean equal share. This is especially true as many experts on group activities advocate for the use of heterogeneous groups, with a large number of possible variables being considered in the formation of diverse groups, e.g., ethnicity, nationality, first language, social class, and sexual identity. The variable of past achievement has particular relevance in any discussion of heterogeneous groups. Students with lower past achievement may face difficulty contributing an equal share toward the group’s goal. Nonetheless, they can, with their own initiative and groupmates’ assistance, do their fair share.

Ways that educators might facilitate individual accountability among group members include:

1. Each group member takes a turn to share their thinking, knowledge, work, feelings, etc. with groupmates.
2. When groups share with the teacher and the entire class, or perhaps with another group, group members are randomly selected to do the sharing, rather than the highest achieving member speaking on behalf of their group.
3. As noted above, as to promoting positive interdependence, individual accountability can also be promoted by each group member having a unique role or resource.

Solitude may often be required for students to prepare to fulfill their obligations to their group, in particular when groups undertake thinking tasks, rather than rote learning. Proponents of group activities often highlight that while rote learning can be done individually, thinking tasks require the multiple perspectives, knowledge, and experience that groups can provide. It is such tasks that bring to life proverbs such as “Two heads are better than one” and “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,” as well as the quote attributed to the co-discoverer of DNA, James Watson that “Nothing new that is really interesting comes without collaboration.”

The importance of the link between solitude, on one hand, and thinking tasks, positive interdependence, and individual accountability, on the other hand, can be seen in an unfortunate way that groups are sometimes used in L2 and other subject areas. For example, if a group of four students are doing a report, presentation, etc., each group member goes off alone to do their one part of the task, and the four parts are later hastily combined. Yes, this qualifies as a thinking task, individual accountability is promoted by the individual section to be done be each member, and if all members receive the same grade for their combined work, in a way, positive interdependence is also promoted.

However, the above example grievously lacks another essential element of successful group activities in educational contexts: skilled, thinking interactions among groupmates should be interspersed with time for students to work alone (Zubridi-Esnaola et al., 2020). Promoting the interplay of time for silence and time for intensive peer interactions forms the principal topic of this paper’s third and final section.

 

Social skills for successful student groups

 

A wide range of forces and voices from society, economics, philosophy, and many other domains discourage students from collaborating with peers and discourage educators from facilitating such collaboration. Just a few of these forces and voices include competitive, norm-referenced, high-stakes exams, as well as winner-take-all competition in so many other areas of society. Additionally, many fear that collaboration impedes motivation and leaves people open to be scammed and otherwise exploited.

Social Interdependence Theory maintains that competition and individualism have value; however, the hope is that people will look for the positive interdependence in any situation and choose the cooperation option where possible. Many cooperative skills need to be developed and deployed for group activities to manifest their many potential benefits. These skills include praising others, thanking others, asking for help, giving explanations, offering constructive feedback, being appreciative of constructive feedback, and graciously reminding others of their responsibilities.  

Solitude can be especially important to in-depth group discussion, because talking “off the top of our heads” easily leads to superficial thinking. Students need time to research, to ponder, to prepare, and then to revise what they have prepared in order to provide substantial contributions to group discussions. Furthermore, for the cooperative skill of polite disagreement, interlocutors may need time to step aside from discussion that otherwise could become overheated and lead people to speak in ways that might damage intragroup relations. Additionally, cooperative skills extend beyond the words people you; non-verbal communication can also be impactful. For example, smiles and relaxed posture and facial expressions can also contribute to group harmony.  

Another cooperative skill involves appreciating and adjusting to diversity. One psychological variable on which group members may differ is extroversion / introversion (Jacobs, 2014). This variable relates to the theme of this article, solitude, with those closer to the introvert side of the continuum more likely to favor alone time, although it should be noted that many experts on group activities suggest that group size not exceed four, with groups of two seeing frequent use. Smaller groups potentially increase the roles that each group member can play. That said, regardless of how small the group, introverts are likely to want some time to work by themselves, and their more extrovert groupmates need to appreciate this, as introverts also need to make space for the preferences of extroverts.

The motivational framework popularly known as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1943) offers insights in how an array of cooperative skills can support a place for solitude within group activities). To review, the five needs in the hierarchy can be labelled as (1) physiological, e.g., food; (2) psychological safety, e.g., encouragement not insults; (3) belonging, i.e., a feeling of being accepted by others; (4) esteem, i.e., others like me and I like myself; and (5) self-actualization, i.e., I can strive to reach my potential. It should be pointed out that some of the needs higher in the hierarchy can be met without all the lower needs being met.

The two examples below show various cooperative skills that could assist in productive use of solitude in the overall context of collaboration. The first example involves George, the first author of this article, who was visiting Clem, one of George’s great nephews, i.e., a four-year-old grandson of one of George’s brothers. Clem and George decided to draw together with the goal of enjoyably spending time together. As to the hierarchy of needs, while hundreds of millions of fellow humans’ physiological needs go unmet (Ritchie et al., 2023), Clem and George had no such concerns. Similarly, their psychological needs were met, thanks in large part to Clem’s parents who had role modelled for him cooperative skills involved in encouraging others when doing drawing and other creative activities. Actually, in the case of this heterogeneous group of two, Clem was the high achiever, while George was the one worried (needlessly) that their efforts would evoke derision. As to belonging needs, both participants belonged as members of the same extended family and had previously that day engaged in joint activities, such as looking (non-invasively) for wild bunnies and Pokemon, and enjoying shaved ice. As to esteem needs, the highlight for George was when his completed work garnered a place on the refrigerator in Clem’s family’s kitchen along with Clem’s work from that and other days.

Finally, both Clem and George had opportunities to achieve their potential, in part via the interaction between them, i.e., although most of the time, they worked alone on their own drawings, sometimes they chatted, mostly when George asked Clem for feedback and advice. Thus, the two were not engaged in “parallel play,” i.e., when young children play next to each other without interacting with one another. Indeed, John-Steiner (2006) documented how people in various arts, e.g., Picasso and Braque in painting, benefited from combining solitary work with episodes of collaboration.

A second example of solitude combining with collaboration occurred between the two authors of this article, Marla and George. An ongoing project of theirs involves promoting and conducting workshops called Writing for the Planet, in which they encourage people to write or otherwise communicate with companies, governments, other organizations, and individuals to encourage them, via praise and other methods, to do what they can on behalf of the environment. Again, like with Clem and George, Marla and George have their physiological and psychological needs met. While Marla and George are not members of the same family, their belonging needs are at least partly met by the fact that both are long-time members of communities of environmental activists, although not the same communities. Furthermore, they affirm their ties with each other and the esteem in which they hold each other by using the cooperative skills of responding punctually and positively to each other’s communications. For instance, one of them works alone on the e-flyer for the workshop or the slide deck to be used at the workshop, before sending it to the other for feedback. Also, the pair use a ritual goodbye at the end of face-to-face meetings, in their case, a fist bump.

 

Conclusion

The purpose of this article has been to highlight the seemingly paradoxical fact that group activities should include time for solitary thought by group members. Such alone time, whether students are physically alone or they are working alone while sitting together, prepares students to be more active members of their groups. Concepts central to supporting this paradox include that the main task of groups lies in the development and contentment of each individual group member, the need for groups to use empathetic insistence to push each member to engage in developing their knowledge and skills, and the growth within students of attitude and skills, both verbal and non-verbal, consistent with the energy needed to the achievement of the groups’ goal.

While this article focused on learning and happiness within groups of two-four students, Dewey (1897) urged that education reach beyond individual desires. Students should be learning with the goal of applying their knowledge and skills in aid of society generally. For example, Maley and Peachey (2017) and Lim et al. (2023) offered innovative lesson plans, often involving groups, that guide L2 students to promote the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Thus, while even during group activities, students should sometimes learn alone, compassion for others is always in the students’ hearts.

 

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