Applying to your context

In this section, I’ve tried to think of four scenarios that I often hear about from instructors where they’re required to pivot or adjust their learning. The first pivot point is when there’s too many groups. You have a large class with many sections and many different small groups working, and it’s hard to know where every group is at the same time.

So in this context, this could be a great opportunity to pair groups. So you can put two groups together and have them reflect on each other’s work, or give feedback on each other’s work using that pre-designed rubric that you already came up with. Or if there are, if it’s a task over many weeks, maybe you rotate through groups that you meet with every week, making sure that you hit each group at least a couple of times.

If it’s a small task, so a one class activity that’s happening in small groups throughout the classroom, maybe you focus in on just two or three groups and you go and work with them and look for common trends. It’s likely that if multiple groups have the same problem, there will be other groups in the class that have the same issue. And you can take a little bit of time at the end of the task to summarize these concerns or challenges for the whole class, or to clarify any tricky points. So thinking about, I don’t need to touch on every single group all the time, but how do I get a fair and equitable representation where all students get an opportunity for feedback?

The second pivot point I encounter is around group versus individual. So thinking about what are the components of the work that are important to give a group grade and which components are important for an individual grade? Thinking about this in your assessment scheme beforehand is a way to anticipate and showcase to students where their importance lies and where the student’s effort should go. So consider that there will be group components that could be peer-assessed, there could be individual components that are self-assessed, or a combination of both. The other strategy is to assess part of the final product for the group mark and to assess individual reflections for the process mark. So we’re going to start talking about process versus product.

The third pivot point is then process versus product. What we’re thinking about here is what are the components of the group work where students need to show proficiency in creating the final product and where students need to show proficiency in developing the process or the skills to execute the task. So when we think about process-oriented phases, thinking about planning, creating bibliographies, developing a project at each stage, so thinking about what we need to provide assessment on, or what students need to get feedback about, instead of just making these inferences based off of the final product.

When we only look at the final product, we’re ignoring all of the steps that it requires to get us to that final product. Then we might want to have students submit minute logs, process logs, key decision points, any progress reports that would show along the way the decisions that they were making and the metacognition that was required. So what are they thinking about as they go through the process? You can send, then evaluate the final product for a portion of the assessment, but not focusing on it entirely for the entire grade.

And the final pivot point that we are encountering more and more these days is the context of hybrid learning. So are we going to be presenting a learning scenario where students are working in a group asynchronously, where they’re working on their own time, but still expected to be collaborative? Or are they working synchronously in the same time, but perhaps in different spaces? For both of these, thinking about components that would help set up the structure. Again, coming back to that scaffolding, how do we set up structures and supports that make synchronous or asynchronous learning more viable?

For synchronous learning I think about having students rotate through roles. Synchronous learning is a great when you’re all in the same space in particular or in a breakout room over Zoom. This is the way where students can take different roles and learn how to do them well. Being the coordinator, the recorder, the timekeeper, and let them know what assessment criteria is relevant for each one. What did you do? Why did you do it? As that rule.

For asynchronous learning, setting up structures like collaborative documents, something like Google Docs or setting up a video conferencing software that students can access, such as Zoom. Depending on your institution, you might have different tools that you would use, but using those tools, the same tools consistently and providing help and support for using them will help students not have to think about the logistics and get into the learning more quickly.

So how do we set up the tools that will be used frequently and consistently, so that students make good decisions about meeting on their own time in a supportive way, and that they can track the work in those collaborative documents? Provide feedback early and often. At the start of the semester, it’s easy to say, you know, go ahead, go do this on your own. But then they don’t know how well they’re doing it. And that’s where we can get into a scenario where students kind of make up their own rules and then find themselves in a tricky position where they’re off track to meeting the learning outcome. So checking in with students that they know how to use the tools at the start and providing formative feedback about how they’re using it early is a way to scaffold that support for students as they go through synchronous or asynchronous learning.