Practical things to try

What can structured group work look like in your class? Well, I’m going to share three different strategies that are guided by those teaching principles I just mentioned that you can use and adapt in your teaching.

The first is the classic ‘Think, Pair, Share’ approach. In this, you give students a question or problem, you ask students to think for a minute or two, individually, about that question or problem, and then pair up with a partner and discuss their answers. During the share phase, you then invite students to share their responses with the entire class. This is one of the simplest structures you can use, but it’s a step up from what I call the Popcorn approach where you just throw out a question and see which students respond.

‘Think, Pair, Share’ gives every student a chance to collect their thoughts, and to kind of vet their ideas with a partner, and to get a little feedback on their answer. And what you’ll find is during the sharing phase, you’ll hear from more and from different students. One thing I like about ‘Think, Pair, Share’ is how adaptable it is. You can decide how long you want this to take. You can decide how students structure their small groups. Do they need to come to consensus during their small group time? Are they gonna share verbally? Or are you gonna use a classroom polling system of some sort? I think of ‘Think, Pair, Share’ as a very simple recipe that I can use and adapt to make lots of different meals in the classroom.

The second activity is, what is sometimes known as ‘Card Sorting.’ So the idea here is that you might give students a set of examples of some kind. So this depends entirely on what you’re teaching. So it could be social movements in a political science course or geological features in an earth science course. Maybe MRI scans in a health sciences course. In my faculty development workshops, I often use superheroes as my kind of case study for this. Whatever makes sense for your content.

And what you do is you give students these examples and you ask students to work in groups to sort the examples into categories of their choosing. They get to decide how to group these objects of study. They get to decide how to form those categories. And what they do is they end up paying attention to the objects themselves, the attributes they have, what they have in common with each other, what some of them don’t have in common with others. And if you’re doing this in a smaller class, sometimes you’ll actually put the examples themselves on index cards of some sort, which is why we call it a card sorting activity. You can imagine students literally moving cards around a table and putting them into groups based on whatever attributes they decide.

Now after the group work, I like to have groups share some of their work with the whole class without identifying why they put these objects in a particular category. I just have them share the members of that category that they’ve defined. And then I ask the other students in the room to reverse engineer the category definition, like why are these three superheroes together, for instance?

Now, ‘Card Sorting’ is a great way to help students notice both surface features in the objects of study, but also deeper and structural features in those objects. It’s also great for fostering a learning community, since students will inevitably approach the objects of study from different perspectives with different experiences, they’ll notice different things about them. And the activity is designed to surface those different perspectives and even to help students value each other’s perspectives through that reverse engineering process. I like that I get surprised by this activity sometimes by how students will think about things. I remember one workshop where I was having them sort superheroes, faculty were sorting superheroes, and one woman said, “These are the superheroes I’ve heard of, and these are the ones that I haven’t.”

The third teaching strategy I want to talk about is one called a ‘Jigsaw.’ And the ‘Jigsaw’, there are actually two rounds of group work. In the first round, each group gets a different thing to do. So maybe it’s a different text, or a different topic, or a different set of readings, and they’re supposed to explore that collectively and discuss. And then in the second round, you mix up the groups so that each second round group has a representative from each of the first round groups. And then you give the second round groups a new question or problem to tackle where they have to synthesise the resources and ideas from the different first round groups.

So, here’s an example from a 2017 article by Kimberly Tanner and colleagues. It’s from Biology. And so, in a developmental biology course, you might look at what is called Body Plan Patterning during embryonic development. I’m a mathematician, so these are unfamiliar words to me. But in this example, the first round groups were assigned different animals to look at and learn about. So fruit flies, nematodes, worms, zebra fish, things like that. Each first round group had a different animal, and then when they moved to their second round groups, they were asked to discuss what they had learned and to then kind of find commonalities among those animals. And so that’s one way you could structure a ‘Jigsaw.’ Different topics in the first round, and then looking for commonalities in the second round.

Now, I love a good Jigsaw. One of the reasons is because in the second round, each student has a unique role as a representative of that first round group. And so this is a really nice way to create interdependence through the group work structure itself. Students are not flying blind though, they have been prepared to play that role in the second round through the interactions in the first round. So hopefully they feel equipped to then bring their own unique perspective to whatever that second round problem is.

Now, here’s another example that you could adapt to a ‘Jigsaw’, especially if you want the students to all read the same thing in the first round. This is something called Structured Reading Groups by an article by sociologists, Parrott and Cherry. And in that case, the reading is the same, but the different students have different roles to play with that reading. So for instance, you might have some students be a passage master. Their job is to find key quotations in the article that are worth discussing with the group. Or some students would be the creative connectors. Their job is to look for connections between the current reading and other things from the course or maybe even outside of the course. And the devil’s advocate, that’s a third role where students’ job is to basically argue with the author and bring that to the group discussion. What I love about the structure is that each role that you’re asking students to play actually connects to an intellectual move that you would want all of your students to make. And the group work structure gives them a chance to practice making those intellectual moves and then essentially get feedback on that practice during the second round groups.