There are many reasons for why we may want our students to work in groups. Personally, and during workshops I have prepared for teenagers, I tried to design group activities for the following purposes:
1. Creating a "learning community" where students learn as group and share their learning experiences.
2. Empowering individual students by giving them more opportunities to express themselves, share their knowledge and expertise, and engage in a collective effort of learning and understanding.
3. Providing students with further opportunities to participate and learn from.
4. Making students' thinking visible which provides me with further data to assess and assist students.
Creating group activities can be very tricky, however. In some situations, we may notice that the activity ends up being a very boring task for some or all of the members. Recently, I came upon a research paper by Michaelsen et al. (1997) that prescribed criteria to take into consideration when designing group activities in order to make the activities engaging and useful to students. Here are two recommendations that caught my attention:
1. Ensuring individual accountability, where the activity explicitly requires the input of each member in a group and each member is held accountable for their participation.
2. Motivating intensive group interaction, where the activity is designed in a way that ensures that each member will have a role in the group activity, and that the activity cannot be completed with the participation of only few members.
Here is a link to the full paper: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1384&context=podimproveacad. The title of the paper is "Designing Effective Group Activities: Lessons for Classroom Teaching and Faculty Development."
Let me know your thoughts! And if you get the opportunity to design an activity based on the paper's recommendations, I would love to hear from you the way things go.
1. Creating a "learning community" where students learn as group and share their learning experiences.
2. Empowering individual students by giving them more opportunities to express themselves, share their knowledge and expertise, and engage in a collective effort of learning and understanding.
3. Providing students with further opportunities to participate and learn from.
4. Making students' thinking visible which provides me with further data to assess and assist students.
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| Image source: https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4014/4579355114_88acb59aa7.jpg |
1. Ensuring individual accountability, where the activity explicitly requires the input of each member in a group and each member is held accountable for their participation.
2. Motivating intensive group interaction, where the activity is designed in a way that ensures that each member will have a role in the group activity, and that the activity cannot be completed with the participation of only few members.
Here is a link to the full paper: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1384&context=podimproveacad. The title of the paper is "Designing Effective Group Activities: Lessons for Classroom Teaching and Faculty Development."
Let me know your thoughts! And if you get the opportunity to design an activity based on the paper's recommendations, I would love to hear from you the way things go.
