Abstract
Complex Instruction is a multifaceted instructional model designed to provide highly challenging learning opportunities for students in heterogeneous classrooms. The model provides a rationale for and philosophy of creating equity of access to excellent curriculum and instruction for a broad range of learners, guidance for preparing students for successful groupwork, direction for the teacher’s role, and principles and practices for “groupworthy tasks”—assignments worthy of student investment and designed to draw on a broad range of abilities for successful task completion. This article focuses on the nature and importance of “groupworthy tasks.”
“The Complex Instruction model offers a way to challenge advanced learners while extending the capacity of many other learners as well.”
Thinking Together, Learning Together
In a high school classroom, students work in small, heterogeneous groups in a ninth-grade math class that has been studying area, volume, and the Pythagorean Theorem. The students work collaboratively to design a swimming pool that will be best for meeting the goals of a family that has both younger and older children, an oddly shaped back yard, and the need to contain building costs. Their assignment lays out specifics of the family’s needs. In the end, groups will present their recommendations to the class as a whole. In addition, each student will have to write a response to the following: “Summarize the problem. In mathematical terms, what are you looking for to solve the problem?” (Watanabe, 2012, p. 37).
Seventh graders explore ways in which historians use historical artifacts to inform their understanding of earlier time periods. Once again, in small, heterogeneous groups, students study floor plans of a castle in Syria during the time of the Crusades. They also listen to recordings of medieval songs, read, and analyze passages from Pope Urban II’s appeal to the masses, and look at negative images of “infidels” from the Crusaders’ Handbook. Over 4 days, each group constructed a castle, explaining how it could be defended against possible invaders, wrote a song using current events of their own time to mirror the purpose of the medieval songs, and presented a skit depicting how the Crusaders’ Handbook might have been used as a recruitment tool. The teacher led a culminating discussion on how historians can effectively use sources like the ones they used to learn about the Crusades (Cohen & Lotan, 2014).
Using props and pictures, primary grade students work in small, heterogeneous groups to decide how to demonstrate the effects that global warming might have on animals in their region. The students will ultimately present their ideas to classmates. Students and the teacher alike were intrigued by the variety of conclusions they drew and the variety of ways in which they shared their ideas.
In each of these classrooms, teachers are using an instructional model called Complex Instruction to frame their work. Rich in possibilities, the model is worthy of consideration by teachers who have an interest in (a) challenging advanced learners, (b) discovering and nurturing capacity in students who may not be readily identified as highly able, (c) supporting equity of access to excellence, (d) promoting complex thinking, (e) building community, and (f) engaging students with important ideas and skills.
Background and Relevance to Gifted Education
Complex Instruction as a model has evolved over the past 30+ years as a result of the work of Elizabeth Cohen, Rachel Lotan, and their colleagues at the Stanford University School of Education, with Cohen’s work focusing on the sociology of classrooms and Lotan’s on pedagogy. Together, they developed the model with the goal of increasing equity of access to high-quality instruction for a much broader range of students than often encounter rigorous learning opportunities in many schools. They maintain that all students in heterogeneous classrooms should be able to work with high-challenge curriculum, be viewed as worthy contributors to constructing understanding, and be able to demonstrate to others what they are learning (Cohen & Lotan, 2014). While they do not contend that Complex Instruction is the sole answer to providing equity and challenge for many more students than is often the case, they do commend it as a very useful approach toward that end. The developers of the model find that the combination of complex problems, open-ended or fuzzy tasks, and student work teams provides fertile ground for challenge, individual contribution, and group collaboration. Figure 1 capsules key reasons that the combination is productive.
A rationale for combining task complexity and groupwork.
Complex Instruction as an instructional model has relevance for Gifted Education for two key reasons. First, it commends curriculum that has a conceptual focus, and assignments that are open ended, call on students to think creatively and critically, enable students to learn and work with the skills of disciplinarians, and position students to create rather than merely reproduce knowledge. These attributes are common descriptors of appropriate curriculum for advanced learners (e.g., Hertberg-Davis & Callahan, 2013; National/State Leadership Training Institute on the Gifted and Talented [N/SLTI-GT], 1979; Tomlinson, et al., 2009). Second, Complex Instruction has a clear focus on providing opportunity for students who are often underserved in schools to experience and succeed in challenging learning contexts. Such students include, for example, those from low-income backgrounds, students of color, students whose first language is not the language of the classroom, and students with learning disabilities. The field of Gifted Education continues to grapple with the need to identify and effectively serve students from these and similar subsets of students. Complex Instruction can be a catalyst for enabling students from these groups to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in advanced academic settings as well as to provide opportunities for teachers to observe such students excel in high-challenge learning experiences, which could contribute to broader identification of high potential in students from underserved groups. Beyond those two factors that point to the model’s relevance for Gifted Education, it is the case that many highly able learners spend much of their school careers in general education classrooms. It seems beneficial for teachers in those classrooms to effectively utilize instructional approaches such as Complex Instruction as one means of providing challenge for advanced learners.
Elements of Complex Instruction
The central goal of the model is to enable students from varied backgrounds, entry points, and educational experiences to grow academically and socially in the context of community and group and individual accountability, and intellectual rigor. While the elements of the model are applicable and beneficial in any kind of classroom, it is the intent of the model to help teachers craft classrooms that “teach up” (Tomlinson, 2017; Tomlinson & Javius, 2012)—that is, classrooms in which instruction is designed to cast each student as a serious learner, teach with a growth mind-set (Dweck, 2006), and provide the support necessary to realize those first two intentions.
The nature of the model is aptly reflected in its name. Not only does the model advocate having students grapple with complex issues and content, but the model itself is complex and multifaceted, offering thoughtful and well-grounded guidance to teachers who want to create classrooms in which academic and social success are available to more students than is often now the case, thus guiding teachers in understanding and working with the complex educational and societal issue of inequity.
The full model of Complex Instruction includes (a) a vision and philosophy, (b) information on and resources for preparing students for successful groupwork, (c) design of “groupworthy tasks” (Cohen & Lotan, 2014), (d) guidance for working effectively with status issues that are evident in most classrooms, and (e) advice on evaluating the success of the model in classrooms. The element of the model that is the focus of this article is “groupworthy tasks.” It is important to note, however, that for groupworthy tasks to have maximum impact on student learning and development, teachers need to understand both the vision for the model and contributors to group success and failure, and to actively engage in what the model refers to as “assignment of status” (Cohen & Lotan, 2014).
“Low status students” (Cohen & Lotan, 2014) are those seen as less likely to be academically successful by peers, and likely by themselves. High status students, on the contrary, are generally perceived to be smart and successful. In assigning status, the teacher observes students carefully as they work together and points out to a group when one of its low status members has made a worthy contribution to the success of the group. Assigning status aims to help members of a group, and ultimately of the class, realize the broad range of abilities in their midst, to draw on those abilities to positively impact their work, and develop a deeper regard for the capacities of their peers.
Designing Groupworthy Tasks
Cohen and Lotan (2014) describe an issue that is common to teachers and students alike, and exasperating to both. For example, a group of four students has a task to complete in a specified time. It is too often the case that two of the students who have confidence in their ability to get the job done right commandeer the work, complete it to specifications, and then become angry with the two students who didn’t contribute to the task. In the minds of the students who did the work, the other two peers are freeloaders. In the minds of the two nonparticipants, they were frozen out. In the end, say Cohen and Lotan, the problem was that the task made it not only possible but even efficient for the two “determined” students to complete the work proficiently with no need for the two “silent partners.”
Groupworthy assignments address the issue of uneven participation in group tasks by advocating that teachers follow several guidelines as they design and implement work that students who are heterogeneous in readiness, background, and perspective will complete. As a baseline, tasks should be rooted in complex issues or problems that can be approached in varied ways that have various solutions. They should call on students to think conceptually about the issues or problems. They should rely on student creativity and insight to address the dilemmas, and they should draw on a variety of strengths, modalities, and skills to reach a satisfactory solution. In other words, groupworthy assignments seek to enlist a much broader range of abilities than the more commonly stressed abilities of reading and computation. Groupworthy tasks, then,
are organized around the big ideas, key concepts, and/or major principles of a content area so that all students are working with essential building blocks of a discipline;
call on multiple intellectual abilities, offer multiple ways to access information and resources (including resources in multiple languages), require multiple representations of information, and invite varied ways of communicating understanding so that all students can be full participants throughout the learning process;
are open ended so that there are multiple possible answers and/or multiple ways of arriving at solutions, so that it is advantageous for students to bring varied perspectives and to propose different routes forward;
are designed to be rich and complex enough for everyone to contribute to the group’s learning, discussion, and final product;
require both student interdependence and individual accountability, so that the group is responsible for drawing on the contributions of all members, and individuals are responsible for contributing to the group’s success and for conceptually mastering the content, and for reflecting the work of the group in their individual work; and
provide clearly stated criteria for both process and product, while still leaving opportunity for students to make mistakes and find their way forward so that the group functions with an effective balance of structures for success and freedom to explore.
In sum, groupworthy student assignments embody many of the attributes often ascribed to curriculum and instruction that is well suited to high-end learners (including a focus on the core meaning of the disciplines, working like a disciplinarian, providing an impetus for critical and creative thinking, open-endedness, abstractness and complexity, high relevance, problem solving, and use of multiple media and technologies). These tasks also support goals of developing and recognizing potential in underserved groups such as students from varied racial and cultural groups, students whose first language is not the language of the classroom, students from low-income backgrounds, and students with both strong ability and one or more disabilities. In other words, groupworthy tasks, in the context of the full model of Complex Instruction, support teachers in developing instruction that is intellectually challenging for students who are already advanced while simultaneously providing access to intellectually challenging instruction for a much broader group of students whose prospects would be greatly enhanced by consistent opportunities to be full participants in rich, relevant, purposeful learning. Following is a detailed example of a groupworthy task in a secondary classroom.
A Groupworthy Task in a High School English Class
Early in the school year, students in a freshman English class were studying the relationship between a writer’s experiences and his or her writing; at the same time, they were working with literary devices and the skill of analyzing poetry. With a need to integrate required standards into student work and a desire to involve a very heterogeneous group of students in thinking deeply about poetry as metaphor for a writer’s experience, the teacher created an assignment for her students that would be completed by small, heterogeneous groups. She used guidelines from the Complex Instruction model to ensure a groupworthy task, prepared students for effective collaboration by using strategies and goals elaborated in the model, and ultimately played the role of consultant to students while they worked rather than “directing” their work. Learning goals or outcomes for the task, which incorporated and expanded on required content standards, were:
Basic biographical information about Robert Frost
“The Road Not Taken”
Metaphor
Simile
Analysis
Our lives become metaphors for who we are and what we believe.
Writers’ works often are or contain metaphors that represent their experiences and beliefs.
Effective writing helps us expand our thinking.
Read and interpret poetry
Make connections between poetry and experience
Interpret and use figurative language appropriately
Work collaboratively
Plan and implement plans effectively
Support reasoning with examples and evidence
The teacher provided students with a Task Card to guide their work. It read,
We have been working with how writers’ lives (and our own lives) are like metaphors that they (or we) create through actions and deeds—including writing. Robert Frost wrote a poem called “The Road Not Taken.” Your task is to analyze the poem as a metaphor for Frost’s life and show us how the metaphor might extend beyond his life. To do that you will need to:
Find the poem, read it, interpret it, and reach a consensus about what’s going on in it and what it means.
Research Frost’s life, making a “stepping-stones” diagram of his life similar to the ones you made for your own lives earlier this month. Your goal is again to depict those experiences that were pivotal in making Frost who he was as a person—not to make a chronology of birth, moves, schooling, and so on.
Develop a soundscape that takes listeners along Frost’s “journey in the woods,” using music, found sounds, and sound effects, and appropriate mime, body sculpture, or narration to help your audience understand the feelings a “journeyer in the woods” might have in coming to straight places, landmarks, decision points, and so on.
Create a visual “overlay” of Frost’s life and the poem, using words and images in a way that illustrates possible metaphorical relationships between the two.
Transfer key ideas in the poem to the life and experience of a noted person about whom we are all likely to know something and about whom we are likely to benefit from learning more. Your transfer must be shared in such a way that your classmates gain a clearer understanding of both the person and the poem. Be sure also to specify how literature can help us understand our lives and the lives of others.
Your final products should demonstrate your understanding of metaphor, the relationship between varied art forms in communicating human meaning, careful thinking and planning, and accuracy in details about the people poem you’re studying.
You should appoint a group facilitator, a reporter, a checker, and a materials manager whose roles we have discussed. Consult the assignment leadership roles posted on the wall near the whiteboard as you need to.
Develop a written groupwork plan, including a time line and check-in times with me.
Everyone in your group should be prepared to present, explain, and defend the content and quality of each of the five components of the assignment, as well as your work plans and results. Each group member will also be asked to respond to a prompt designed to reflect your understanding of the goals for the assignment. Remember that work an individual completes must reflect the understandings and intent of the group as a whole.
Thinking About the Example
The “Road Not Taken” assignment was important in helping students develop ownership and interest in understanding, analyzing, and interpreting a poem. The poem the teacher chose for the assignment was brief enough to be manageable, clear enough to be approachable, and yet open enough to apply to experiences of the students as well as many individuals they could think of in the public arena. Task components required students to use pivotal content standards, but in ways that gave them relevance and meaning.
A number of students in the class had learning challenges, including learning disabilities, emotional issues, and attention problems. Some of those students were also very strong thinkers and creative problem solvers. A number of students in the class were from low-income backgrounds. About a third of the students were not native English speakers. Several students were quite advanced in writing and literature. For those reasons, the teacher provided some resources for information gathering, including books and websites at various levels of reading challenge, a podcast accompanied by a written script, a video about Frost’s life, and images that related to the poem. She also encouraged students to find resources that would push their thinking and included in her suggestions links to several university sites with extensive collections related to Frost. In addition, she made available to the students basic materials and equipment they might find useful in designing and completing their work.
The various elements in the group project encouraged expression of understanding in a range of media and formats beyond essay writing, a common mode of expression in English classes. In the end, however, all students had to be able to communicate in writing their understanding of the unit’s big ideas. The fact that each student had to be able to explain and interpret the work of each other student in the group and reflect the decisions and intent of the group made it important for students to communicate regularly throughout their time together.
While students worked, the teacher used her time in three important ways. First, she observed the groups at work, taking notes on helpful and unhelpful things she heard and saw. Second, she met with groups during the check-in times they requested, asking them questions that probed their thinking about issues the students raised as well as questions prompted by her observations. Her goal in both instances was to help students find their own routes to success. Finally, she listened carefully to student comments and conversations in both their work groups and during check-in times, assigning status to low status students when their ideas and contributions moved their groups along.
The teacher generally developed one groupworthy task based in the Complex Instruction model during each unit. As time passed, students became more skilled in working together, more independent of her in their problem solving, and more thoughtful in their responses. She was particularly gratified by the fact that students who had often been outliers in groups and on the fringes in class discussions felt freer to speak up. In fact, higher status students began to turn to them for ideas and input.
Higher status students nearly always found the levels of abstractness and complexity in the groupworthy assignments to be interesting and found themselves stretching to express what they were learning in unexpected modes. Availability of and encouragement to use advanced resources nearly always resulted in a broader or deeper understanding of a topic. In addition, the teacher began to meet with these students individually to talk about personal goals that seemed useful for them to pursue in groupwork, in class, and through individual assignments.
In an end-of-course evaluation, a good number of previously lower status students wrote that this class was their first school experience of feeling like a “real student.” A significant number of higher status students noted that they had a much more generous sense of important abilities that their classmates brought to their discussions and groupwork.
The Complex Instruction model offers a way to challenge advanced learners while extending the capacity of many other learners as well. Used with fidelity to the model, it addresses common pitfalls in designing effective groupwork and encourages collaboration around rich problems among individuals with diverse perspectives—by all accounts, vital 21century skills. It balances group and individual responsibilities, and builds classroom community.
The full model of Complex Instruction provides resources and detailed guidance to support teacher growth in understanding and implementing the model as well as to support student growth in productive collaboration. Both are important in achieving maximum benefit from the model. It is an instructional approach that stretches teachers, just as it stretches students, and as is often the case in life, the effort it requires is nearly always rewarded—for both groups.
Footnotes
Conflict of Interest
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Bio
Carol Ann Tomlinson, EdD, is William Clay Parrish, Jr. Professor and Chair of Educational Leadership, Foundations, and Policy at the University of Virginia’s (UVA) Curry School of Education where she is also Co-Director of the University’s Institutes on Academic Diversity. Prior to joining the faculty at UVA, she was a public school teacher for 21 years. During that time, she taught students in high school, preschool, and middle school and also administered programs for struggling and advanced learners. She is a former Virginia Teacher of the Year. At UVA, she was named Outstanding Faculty Member at Curry and also won an All-University Teaching Award. She has written more than 300 articles, book chapters, and books on curriculum, instruction, and differentiation. Her books are available in 14 languages.