Emphasizing Process in Small Group Activities:
Comments(1) I found this chapter to be a very practical guide to facilitating small group activities. It provides a strong, yet flexible, foundation that teachers can build upon and reshape to fit the needs of their specific content areas. I have no doubt that many of these methods provide rich language and content learning environments because I have experienced many of them as a student (mostly in the B.Ed. program) and have benefited from these techniques.
However, as I reflect on my high school experiences with small group work, I find that there was a much greater emphasis on “product” focused groups in the majority of my classes and much less on “process” focused group work. In retrospect, it is clear to me that this “product” orientation was a barrier to the communal sharing of knowledge and use of academic language. Zwiers suggested that “process” focused groups are developing their “academic collaboration skills” (139) and that they find ways of “thinking together” (139) and consequently,” students construct new knowledge and new academic skills” (139). Conversely, in my experience a “product” focused activity produces anxiety and this causes student to abandon collaboration for quick fixes and higher grades and welcomes many negative elements into the group work.
Often, members who are doing well in the course and are contentious students worry that the group work will bring down their grades. Therefore, these students will often opt to do the majority of the work themselves and exclude others from the process of creating the product and the learning that comes with it. Subsequently, the students who are not receiving high grades and who may be less interested in the course have the perfect opportunity to disengage and leave all of the creation, and the learning, for the other students to do. This means that many students learn and develop less during group work than if they were assigned an individual project.
I think that teachers often miss the key components of what differentiates the effective small group work from the ineffective small group work and “product” orientation is one of the main issues. Therefore, I feel that it is necessary that teachers explicitly emphasize “process” oriented group work in myriad ways. For example, teachers should not ask students to produce something that will be marked on its own merit. I believe that product creation can aid learning but only if the creating is emphasized and the product deemphasized. By only grading the process or heavily weighting the grade towards the process part of the project, it helps to put students into a better mindset for collaborating, sharing, being patient and being open with one another. With their evaluation, the teacher is making a statement about what they value most about the group work and a “process” focus helps all of the students become more at ease to create, explore, take risks, challenge each other and acquire new knowledge. Furthermore, teachers must make the importance of the “process” clear, by making the grading criteria transparent and by providing guiding questions, prompts and reminders that keep the students in this mindset. My experiences of “process” oriented small group work were exponentially more educational that “product” oriented group work and sadly the latter was, and may still be, the much more common experience for students in typical high schools.
Melanie Reich
Works Cited:
Zwiers, J. (2008). Academic speaking and listening in small groups. In Building academic language: Essential practices for content classrooms (Ch.6, pp. 135-162). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass
Response: Process in Small Group Activities
I agree with Melanie’s points here regarding the value of process in group activities. I too, remember many scenarios in secondary school where we would be placed in small groups and given a task. There was very rarely, if ever, an emphasis placed on the process itself. Most of the time the evaluation and therefore the value was based entirely on the final product. In my experience, I would always dread group work because it meant one of two things: either I would be the student with most of the weight placed on my shoulders in an effort to produce quality work on time, or there would be someone in the group that would have the most dominant voice and therefore would “assume” the position of controlling the direction of the product, leaving little room for anyone else’s opinions, ideas or learning experience.
Consequently, I absolutely agree with Melanie’s point that teachers need to emphasize the value of the process as much as possible. I would tend to evaluate group work all the way through the process, and perhaps create “check points” of some sort, where I could assess what is happening within the group and ensure that everyone is contributing ideas and has a part in the collaborative process. I observed an excellent activity recently that required every group member to assume a certain “role” in the project of comic strip creation (the roles were outlined and described in the handout). The roles included researcher, artist, typist, and conversation manager, among others. I thought it was a great idea to ensure that the work was distributed fairly, but I also think the teacher still needs to assess the process to monitor engagement and collaboration amongst the group members.