Applying to your context

As you think about applying in class group work to your teaching context, you will have a few choices to make. One big one is whether or not to have persistent groups. These are groups whose members stay the same over multiple class sessions, maybe the entire course. Now, if you let students pick their own groups, you will end up with a defacto persistent groups ’cause students tend to just work with the people they sit next to and that tends to be pretty stable. But, you may find that you would like to have a greater role in forming the groups and their composition. You may also want to know for sure that students will actually be in persistent groups over time and so you may want to start with persistent groups yourself.

Now, one advantage of persistent groups is that students should get better at working together over time. And so you can give them increasingly challenging tasks to take on. Another advantage is that they provide a kind of built-in social network for learning for students. So you’ll often see students who are in persistent groups, get together outside of class to study and learn with each other, which can be really helpful. So, persistent groups take a little more time and effort on your part to get going, but they do offer some advantages that I wanted you to think about, to see if that would make sense for your teaching context.

Another question I get from instructors about groups a lot is how to form groups. What would, what should we keep in mind, when we’re putting groups together? And I’ll reference a teaching guide on groups by my colleague, Cynthia Brame and some co-authors. They reviewed the literature on group work and made a few recommendations based on that. One is that they see the optimal group size as three to five students. That tends to promote more cooperation and less social loafing, as they say. They also recommend that groups be gender balanced and ethnically diverse and have members that have different problem solving approaches, if you can figure that out. Those elements have been shown to enhance group collaboration. So, for instance, when it comes to gender, you might avoid a group that has three men and one woman in it, because the participation in that group might be less equitable. A better choice would be two men and two women.

Now, what should you do when students are working in groups? This is another question I hear sometimes. So a pretty classic move is to circulate among the students and eavesdrop. This gives you a little insight into how they’re working the problem or how they’re thinking about things, and also makes you more available for students to flag you down and ask questions. That approach is not always practical, given the size of the classroom or the physical layout. And so an alternative is to ask students to use a collaborative digital document of some kind, where they report out their group work as they go. So for instance, you might give them all edit access to a collaborative, to a digital slide deck and give each group a different slide, where they are supposed to report out and kind of type up their answers as they go. This allows you to get a sense of their progress through the tasks, ’cause you can page through the slides very quickly and you can also see what students are thinking, what they’re reporting, so that you can then plan how you wanna follow up after the group work time. There may be a particular group that has a a really good question or a really good idea that you wanna call on, and you can start to kind of get ready for that during the group work to make better use of class time after the group work.