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Welcome to this course on facilitating in-class group work. I’m Derek Bruff, I’ll be your instructor. I was the director at the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University for over a decade. I’m excited to lead you through this course. We’re going to be talking about why group work is an effective teaching strategy. We’ll also be looking at some elements of group work that need to be in place to make it successful, and we’ll talk about several practical strategies to use in class group work in your course. By the end of this course, you should have a few new approaches to try as well as some language to use to talk about your use of group work to students and to colleagues.
In higher education, we have limited class time with our students, often just two or three hours a week. How can we make the most of this special time, when students and instructors are together at the same time or place? In-class group work provides a way to engage students actively with our material, and it helps turn our classes into learning communities, where students learn from and with each other. This course is designed to help you get started using group work in your classes or add to your toolbox of effective group work strategies.
“In order to learn, we need practice working with new ideas and concepts and skills and we need feedback on that practice, and group work can provide opportunities for both of that“
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