Co-operative Learning: the social and intellectual outcomes of learning in groups
Edited by Robyn M Gillies and Adrian F Ashman
RoutledgeFalmer pound;22.50

Teaching Without Disruption in the Secondary School: a model for managing pupil behaviour
By Roland Chaplain
RoutledgeFalmer pound;19.99

Handbook for Learning Mentors in Primary and Secondary Schools
By Margaret Roberts and Dot Constable
David Fulton pound;16

The language of education periodically shifts. “You’ll need to learn this,” a teacher would say, and it meant memorising things. We now know that the concept is more slippery: learning can even happen - heaven help us - without the presence of teachers. Thus a new education industry is opening up, rightly, to get teachers thinking more analytically not just about what they are teaching, but more crucially about what our pupils might be learning.

Robyn Gillies and Adrian Ashman work in education at the University of Queensland. They start by reminding us that the concept of collaboration in learning is relatively new. For example, it was the early development of the social sciences from the 1920s onwards that began to explore the notion of teamwork: Gordon Allport in 1924 found that “there was a distinct increase in the quantity and quality of individuals’ work when they were able to see and hear others working”.

Read more in this week’s TES Friday magazine