Group Work

Students must first be taught the necessary skills needed to participate in group activities. These include:

• Sharing Skills
• Participation Skills
• Communication Skills
• Listening Skills

The instructions must be clearly stated and there should be no ambiguity among the students. By giving the students clearlly defined roles this greatly decreases the misbehavior and increases learning time.  The teacher should have questions and instructions for each of the roles that the students can work on independently and then merge to share as a group. Examples of the roles are:

• Summarizer
• Researcher
• Checker
• Runner
• Observer
• Recorder

Possible Discussion Roles


Facilitator/Encourager: This student gets discussion moving and keeps it moving, often by asking the other group members questions, sometimes about what they've just been saying.

Timekeeper: Someone needs to make sure that the group stays on track and gets through a reasonable amount of material in the given time period.

Summarizer: Every so often (perhaps once per question for a list of questions, or at the end for one question), this student provides a summary of the discussion for other students to approve or amend.

Reflector: This student will listen to what others say and explain it back in his or her own words, asking the original speaker if the interpretation is correct.

Elaborator: This person seeks connections between the current discussion and past topics or overall course themes.
 
There are a variety of different ways in which the students can work in groups these are:

• Thinking buddies- Allows the students to discuss what they are thinking and then report on their buddies ideas (promotes active listening)
• Buzz Groups- For preliminary discussions.
• Jigsaw-Where group members work on specific tasks and then come together to report findings.
• Crossover Groups- same as jigsaw but spilt again and report to small groups.
• Whole class- group- individual- A reversal that allows students to eventually work independently at home.
• Snowball groups (2-4-6-8)-In which the groups gradually increase as the lesson progesses
• Checkers- Students work independently then check each others answers and decide together on the correct answer.

I love to use group work with integrated projects were students have to research information and present it to the whole class as a poster and a presentation.