Academic Listening and Group Discussion
Comments(1) I think that group discussions can be both a beneficial and challenging activity to implement in the classroom. Students often enjoy the idea of group work because they want to work with people they know and don’t always use the time to discuss the topics and goals assigned. I think that the activity we did in class could be very useful in a high school classroom; providing sentence starters and conversation guides will help students stay on track and make use of academic language. It is also important to consider having the teacher determine the groups, especially when beginning to establish a pattern of group work in the class. Teaching students how to have effective and meaningful conversations, where students are respectful, cooperative and think critically, is another major issue. There needs to be a strong classroom community if we are to expect students to be comfortable contributing and taking risks within their groups. If students are shy or unsure about how their ideas will be received, they are less likely to engage with the discussion and benefit from the small group format. Learning how to listen to others and contribute fairly to a group is also something that many students will need to be taught. While it can often seem like a simple activity, group discussions have a lot of challenging aspects. To be a meaningful exercise where all of the members learn cooperatively, rather than taking the divide and conquer approach that is so common with most group projects or activities in school, there must be some scaffolding of what group work should look like in advance.
When looking at group discussions, I agree with your post that it can be both beneficial and a challenge to implement within the classroom. Some problems that students have in groups are the ability to stay on task and the ability to talk academically about the subject matter. A strategy to help students stay on task in group work is assigning roles to different members of the group. If every group member has a task such as the writer, the facilitator, the speaker, and the organizer, every student will have a task that they need to complete, and therefore it can help the group as a whole to stay on task.
I also agree with your beliefs of how there needs to be a strong classroom community to have success in group work activities. This community can be built by doing team building games, especially at the beginning of the year, where the students are able to work with and laugh with each other. Some games that can help build communities are the human knot activity, trust exercises and the stomp game that we did in our guest lecture seminar. Teachers also has a large part in building the classroom community, and needs to take it upon themselves to engage actively in discussions and activities that can continue to help develop the community.