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As we finish this course, I want you to remember the three teaching principles that we shared earlier. Students need practice and feedback on their learning and group work can provide that. Turning your course into a learning community can enhance the learning for all students as they learn from and with each other. And group work activities that feature interdependence are more likely to be useful for student learning and more practical for your course. Keep these things in mind as you are designing your group work activities.
Also, trust the process. Be okay that you are not in full control. When you launch your students out in group work it’s a different feeling at the front of the room than when you are lecturing and kind of running the whole show, but learning is hard work and students need some control over their time and their focus to do that hard work. And so, you gotta trust the process a little bit.
Having good structures for your group work will help, will help keep that group, those students on track. And if things go off-track, remember that you are still in-charge. You can intervene, you can adjust, you can restructure things as necessary. No instructor is great at using group work the first time out. Like other aspects of teaching, facilitating group work is a skill that you develop over time with practice and with feedback.
Thanks for being a part of this course on group work. I’ve been your host, Derek Bruff. I’m excited to have shared some ideas with you. I hope you got some practical strategies and some principles you can use in your teaching and I’d love to hear how you use group work in your teaching. So please do share in the comments. Thanks.
- Students need practice and feedback, and group work can provide that.
- Turning your course into a learning community can enhance the learning for all students.
- Group work that features interdependence is likely to be more useful.
Thank you for taking this ‘Leading In-Class Group Work’ course which has been developed with Derek Bruff. We hope you have enjoyed it. Remember to mark this lesson as ‘Mark Complete’ to earn your Course Completion Badge.
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Think-Pair-Share Infographic, Derek Bruff, Creative Commons licensed.
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Discussions
As you think ahead to running in-class groups, what’s one thing that might go wrong? How can you plan for that one thing, so that it doesn’t become a roadblock to learning?
Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below.