Small Group Learning

Why we do it, the research behind it and the success we are seeing in our students!

Why Small Groups?

At Personal Best, small group tutoring sessions are our bread and butter! They are our most popular tutoring option for students from primary school to secondary school and are the most affordable option for our students. Our small groups are just that, with a maximum of 4 students per group at any time, we ensure that all students still have access to individualised support from our tutors that is tailored to their needs and the way they learn throughout their session, whilst also allowing opportunities for collaborative learning and discussion to solidify core learning concepts.

What does the research say?

The use of small-group learning has been well documented in scientific studies and literature for many years and presents many benefits to learners from Prep all the way through to adulthood. Small groups benefit students by: facilitating deeper learning and understanding of concepts, increased active participation in their learning, development of social skills, increase the accountability and responsibility over their own learning and provides opportunities for students to learn collaboratively with other students of a similar level.

Facilitating Deeper Learning

Small groups offer students an opportunity to talk through strategies for problem-solving or key concepts with their peers, facilitating a deeper understanding of these concepts or strategies and providing repeated exposures to key content, aiding retention and recall in the long term. By learning alongside peers, students are exposed to multiple strategies to solve the same problem in addition to seeing multiple representations and explanations of key content.

Increase in Active Participation

When students are surrounded by peers all working towards a shared goal such as trying to master a maths or literacy skill, it encourages students to remain focused on their work, builds motivation to “lock in” to their learning and helps to maintain a standard of effort that should be put into their work. Students who are in small groups with other students are required to interact with each other and the content rather than sit back and “absorb” it, which can be easy for quiet students to do when working one-on-one with a tutor if not supported to actively engage with their learning.

Social Skill Development

Working in small-groups not only provides a built-in study group for students, but builds a community between students, their tutor and even their families. Collaboration is a fundamental part of Personal Best’s teaching model and underpins all we do to support our students and their families. Being in a small-group, students are faced with times where they are required to explain their reasoning to their tutor and peers, be attentive listeners when their peers are explaining their reasoning and understandings and be able to use respectful discussion to resolve small conflicts that may occur from time to time. During these times, our tutors are able to carefully and responsively scaffold student interactions to teach these skills explicitly to students and help them to work through social situations with kindness and understanding.

Collaborative Learning

Small groups offer something that individual tutoring does not, and that is collaborative learning. Collaborative learning is listed as a High Impact Teaching Strategy (HITS - Australian Department of Education); where students must work together to achieve a common goal that they could not reach independently. By actively working with their peers, not just alongside them, students learn to delegate roles to suit their strengths which builds a motivation to complete their task and in turn their motivation to learn. It requires students to think together, discussing ideas, strategies and the order in which tasks need to be done in addition to explaining their own understanding effectively, understanding the explanations from their peers and provides an opportunity to clarify misunderstood concepts as they combine their individual understandings throughout the collaboration process. When the learning task is linked explicitly with curriculum content, the process of collaborative learning solidifies their understanding of the content, provides context for this learning and helps to connect it to prior knowledge, aiding retention and recall of this information.

What have we seen at PB?

At Personal Best we have seen a noticeable change in the way our students approach their tutoring sessions when in small groups. They are more focused and feel a sense of responsibility for how they impact their peers’ learning in their group. They build friendships with their peers that continue even outside of tutoring as they see each other succeed in their learning, develop an understanding of each others likes and dislikes, strengths and challenges. By seeing their peers make mistakes and keep trying to master a skill in tutoring they then feel more comfortable to attempt tasks themselves, even when there is a chance they will get it wrong, as they have been shown time and time again that their tutoring group is an encouraging, safe space where they can ask questions, clarify content they do not understand and work with their tutor and peers to learn. Finally, students show a greater understanding of communication skills, they become comfortable to greet their peers, tutor and other tutors by name, they learn how to calmly and respectfully share their opinion or understanding while also hearing out the opinions of others, and respond in a respectful way whether agree or not.

All this is not to say that individual tutoring is not an extremely valuable option. There are times where individual tutoring sessions are the correct option for a student; whether that be a student working towards an extremely high ATAR score for a difficult subject or a student who may have social anxiety or other factors that impact their ability to interact with a group in a learning setting comfortably. It is to say, that small-group tutoring is often overlooked as being not of equivalent benefit for many students, when the research says otherwise.