Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

Yesterday, I was at a professional Teaching English as an Additional Language conference at the University of Alberta under the theme of “Creating Ripples”. Of course, the overwhelming tendency in the audience of the conference, and the framing keynote, was that it was instructors who were creating ripples. This is typical of teachers and their need to feel like they are “making an impact.” What I propose below runs in the opposite direction… what if the teachers build the pond, and it is the learners who create the ripples?

What if the most powerful educational technology available to us right now is not artificial intelligence, adaptive software, predictive analytics, or the next digital learning platform? What if the most powerful educational technology is still the human small group?

This may sound counterintuitive at a moment when so much educational attention is focused on AI. We are told, often with good reason, that artificial intelligence will change how students write, research, study, translate, organize, and demonstrate learning. Many of these changes are already happening. Students are using tools that can summarize articles, generate outlines, correct grammar, explain concepts, and simulate tutoring conversations. Teachers are being asked to adapt quickly, sometimes with excitement, sometimes with anxiety, and often with uncertainty about what counts as authentic learning in this new environment.

Yet beneath all of these changes there remains a more basic question: how do human beings actually become capable learners? Before we ask what technology can do for students, we need to ask what kind of social conditions allow students to develop attention, confidence, responsibility, judgment, and agency. My claim is simple: small groups are not merely useful classroom techniques. They are one of the oldest and most powerful structures through which human beings learn, cooperate, and become capable of action.

Long before formal schooling, long before universities, and long before digital platforms, people learned in small, face-to-face communities. They learned through imitation, correction, encouragement, shared memory, practical responsibility, and trust. A child learned by watching someone more capable. A novice learned by participating at the edge of a practice before being trusted with more. A community preserved its knowledge not only by storing information, but by embodying it in relationships. Learning was not separated from life. It was woven into belonging.

This matters because individualized education, at least in its current institutional form, is beginning to strain under the weight placed upon it. Accessibility departments are overwhelmed. Teachers are facing increasingly complex classrooms. Neurodiversity is more visible across student populations, which is a necessary correction to older models that too often treated difference as deficiency. But this visibility also reveals a wider range of attentional patterns, anxieties, social capacities, learning needs, and forms of intelligence than many traditional classroom structures were designed to support.

The traditional lecture model often assumes that students already possess the agency required to succeed. It assumes that they can organize themselves, regulate attention, interpret expectations, manage time, ask for help, translate information into action, and persist through difficulty. Some students can do this. Many cannot, at least not yet. After COVID, the problem has become more visible. Many learners are more isolated, more anxious, less socially practiced, and less confident in their ability to participate meaningfully in a shared learning environment.

The key insight is that agency should not be assumed. It must be socially cultivated. If we treat agency as something students either have or lack, we will continue to design systems that reward the already-capable and frustrate those who are still developing the conditions of capability. But if agency develops through social conditions, then the classroom cannot be understood merely as a place where information is delivered to isolated individuals. It must be understood as a formative environment.

A Social Model of Learning begins here. It structures education around small groups of three to five learners, not as occasional discussion clusters or project teams, but as ongoing sites of recognition, peer scaffolding, shared accountability, identity formation, and agency-building. In such a group, students are not hidden in the anonymity of the classroom. They are seen by others. They practice responsibility. They receive immediate feedback. Their strengths become visible, and their struggles are not left entirely to private endurance.

This model also changes how we imagine the teacher. The teacher remains essential, but not as the only source of learning. The teacher becomes a designer of conditions, a facilitator of the group ecology. The teacher forms the groups, clarifies expectations, monitors patterns of participation, intervenes when necessary, and helps students interpret what they are experiencing. Peers become co-constructors of learning. They are not simply classmates occupying the same room. They become part of the architecture through which learning happens.

This is especially important because many students cannot move directly from instruction to independent performance. They need an intermediate social space where they can observe, imitate, test, fail, try again, and gradually become more capable. The small group provides such a space. It allows learners to move from invisibility to contribution, from anxiety to participation, from passive reception to shared responsibility.

There is also a deeper reason this works. Human beings evolved as social learners. For most of human history, people lived in communities where learning was embedded in face-to-face relationships. Small groups enabled trust because people knew who could be counted on. They supported norm formation because behavior was visible. They made correction possible because learners could receive feedback in context. They encouraged cooperation because survival depended on shared effort. They also made innovation possible because new practices could be tested, refined, and passed on.

Large institutions can preserve culture, and formal systems can organize it, but small groups transmit, adapt, and renew culture. They are where practices become embodied. They are where values are tested. They are where people learn not only what to do, but what kind of person they are becoming. In education, this means that the classroom is not merely a delivery system for content. It is a cultural environment in which students learn how to attend, cooperate, speak, listen, disagree, take responsibility, and imagine themselves as capable participants in a shared world.

This brings us to recognition. Drawing on thinkers such as Charles Taylor and Hannah Arendt, we can say that agency is relational. People do not become fully capable in isolation. They become capable through being seen, affirmed, challenged, and recognized by significant others. Taylor helps us see that identity is formed dialogically. We come to understand who we are through relationships of recognition, and we can be wounded by misrecognition. Arendt helps us see that human beings disclose themselves through action and speech in the presence of others. We do not fully know who we are before we act. We discover and reveal ourselves in a shared public space.

Small groups create a modest but powerful realm of recognition. They allow a student to become visible without being exposed to the overwhelming scale of the whole classroom. They give learners a place to speak, contribute, receive feedback, and experience themselves as someone whose presence matters. For students who have internalized failure, marginalization, or invisibility, this can be deeply formative. A small group may be the first place where a learner experiences competence in the eyes of others.

This is not sentimental. It is educationally serious. Recognition helps build agency because it gives the learner social evidence that they can act meaningfully. A student who is seen contributing begins to understand themselves as someone who can contribute. A student whose strength is noticed may begin to risk participation in areas where they previously felt inadequate. A student who receives help may later become the one who helps another.

This also invites a different way of thinking about neurodiversity. Instead of approaching neurodiversity primarily through the language of pathology, we can begin with the language of cognitive diversity. This does not mean ignoring real challenges. It does not mean pretending that all differences are easy or that accommodations are unnecessary. It means asking how different forms of attention, perception, memory, pattern recognition, creativity, persistence, and practical intelligence can become resources inside a group.

In many classrooms, a student’s strength may remain hidden because the dominant structure does not know how to recognize it. A learner who struggles with abstract instruction may excel in practical problem-solving. A student who has difficulty speaking in front of the whole class may become a careful listener and reliable peer mentor. A learner whose interests seem narrow may, under the right conditions, discover that those interests are doorways into confidence, competence, and meaningful participation. Difference becomes resource inside the group.

Of course, this does not happen automatically. Poorly designed groups can intensify exclusion. They can allow one voice to dominate, marginalize quieter students, punish difference, or become closed and suspicious. Small groups have a Janus face. They can cultivate belonging, but they can also produce conformity. They can support trust, but they can also become tribal. They can deepen commitment, but they can also encourage groupthink.

This is why small groups must be intentionally designed. Educators need to cultivate openness, hospitality, and diversity within them. They need structures for rotating responsibility so that the same students do not always lead and the same students do not always disappear. Students need to learn how to handle disagreement, how to include others, how to notice who is silent, and how to remain connected to the wider classroom community. The answer to the risks of small groups is not to abandon them. It is to form them well.

Several design principles can help. Groups need a clear purpose, so students understand why the group exists and what kind of learning it supports. They need stable membership, because trust requires time. They need shared accountability, because participation matters not only for the individual but for the success of others. They need opportunities for peer mentoring, immediate feedback, and conflict resolution. They also need connection to the wider classroom, so the group does not become a closed circle but remains part of a larger learning community.

At their best, small groups move education from accommodation to participation. Accommodation remains essential, but it is not enough. Students do not only need access to content. They need meaningful participation in a learning community. They need to be drawn into practices where agency can be exercised and strengthened.

Small groups also move education from individual performance toward shared flourishing. Performance can measure certain outcomes, but it cannot fully account for the development of confidence, cooperation, responsibility, identity, and judgment. When education is organized entirely around individual achievement, it may produce technically capable but socially fragile learners. When it includes shared responsibility, it forms students who can cooperate, listen, contribute, and act with others.

This has civic significance as well. Classrooms are not only preparing workers. They are cultivating citizens capable of cooperation. Democratic life does not emerge simply because a society possesses democratic institutions. It depends on habits of trust, disagreement, responsibility, mutual obligation, and shared practice. These habits have to be learned somewhere. The classroom can become one of those places.

The human small group is not a nostalgic alternative to technology. It is not a rejection of AI, digital tools, or educational innovation. Rather, it is a reminder that the deepest forms of learning remain social, relational, and embodied. Technology may assist learning, extend access, and offer new forms of support. But it cannot replace the formative power of being known, challenged, encouraged, and needed by others.

If small groups helped humanity evolve, they may also help education evolve. The question before us is not whether we should use technology, but whether we will remember what kind of beings are using it. We are not isolated processors of information. We are social learners whose agency is formed in relation. If this is true, then one of the most important questions educators can ask is this: what would happen if we designed every classroom as a micro-community for human flourishing, rather than simply a site of content delivery?