LLED 360

In physical education, there are many opportunities to incorporate group work into
the classroom, however traditionally this group work often does not involve much conversation or deep discussion.  Standard group work in a physical education class involves working with a partner or small groups on specific skills and progressive activities.  After this, the class is usually put into two different teams and at the end of the class the teams play in a full-court/field version of the game or sport being taught.  However, this week in our physical education pedagogy class we learned how we can incorporate an inventing games unit into our year plans, and I think it can also be a great way to increase the amount of group discussion and conversation that typically takes place within group work.  Inventing games requires the student groups to choose their equipment, develop rules and structure for the game, as well as ensure that their game flows and is fair for both teams playing – among many other things.  For these aspects to be created, the groups need to be able to effectively
communicate and diplomatically make decisions.  This gives the instructor the opportunity to teach students about how to create an effective discussion forum, for example, appointing ‘jobs’ such as a scribe to record the information, a facilitator who keeps the group on task, as well as how to ensure all members have the opportunity to contribute to the conversation.  While going through their ‘inventing
games checklist’, groups are able to read the physical education specific language – such as offense, defense, boundaries, scoring, etc. – as well as use it in their conversations while they work on developing their game.  Once they have decided on some rules and structural components, the groups can test out their ideas and find out what is working and what is not.  With helpful cues and probing questions from the teacher, the students will continue to test their ideas and reconvene, continuing to use the discussion forum to problem solve and develop more aspects of their game.  I think this is also a great way to get ELL’s and non-participant students involved in a class they may not particularly like or understand as well because everyone gets an opportunity to listen to others and present their own ideas.

I really like the idea of news program. I have done this in social studies classes during high school several times, but never in Home Economics. We can bring in news stories on food and nutrition. This will make it a more engaging way to bring current events into the classroom and it will allow the students to actually interact with the content and make it relevant to them and the class. There is so much that students can learn from this activity. There is role playing involved – another one of Zwiers’ suggestions, students can get really creative by dressing up, using props, making backdrops, designing the set, and also practice making a video if they wish, or perform it live. If a news story is too difficult, students can also do a cooking segment. Both will help students practice speaking. Students will also have to be aware of how the use of language and reporting will differ between these two even though they can both be on the same topic eg.how are you going to talk about potatoes in a cooking show vs. a news report?

The expert panel is also another great discussion activity suggested by Zwiers to encourage use of academic language. In a family studies class for example, we could be looking at a topic such as life course development and have a panel of experts talk about the different needs of family members depending on where they are in the life course (eg. child, adolescent, adult etc.)

I also really like Pro-Con. It is important to be able to think about both sides of a question. We could look at a product, an issue, or even a lifestyle. I remember in Planning 10 learning about decision making and in family studies as well during my undergrad. Pro-Con is an activity that can definitely be used during this lesson. It will also encourage students to revisit other topics covered related to consumption such as values, attitudes, and lifestyles.

I really liked the idea of the partner problem solving for math. I think it is a good way to expose students to different methods of approaching the same question. It also gives students someone to help them interpret the content of a math problem which, at times, can be very difficult, even for high performing students. Given the proper pairings, I also think this activity can be used to get higher achieving, more fluent students to peer mentor students who may be struggling. The mentor can take the position of the listener and help clarify anything that is confusing the solver. Depending on the student, the listener may also be able to model the use of academic language. Afterwards, when the solver explains their solution, they are given an opportunity to use the new language they have learned and also explain how they extracted specific information from the written question.

For many areas in math, being able to read the material is a challenge of its own, especially when the questions are written in math symbols rather than in words. There are many symbols that are very similar in appearance and can be very confusing. Here are a few examples of these similar symbols:

There are times when students understand all of the material and know how to apply what they have learned but are just not able to because they do not understand the symbols or words that are used in the question that is being posed to them. The more students read these symbols and hear them translated, the easier it will be for them to be able to distinguish them and be able to accurately interpret them in the future. As students proceed to higher levels of math this skill becomes increasingly important and therefore needs to be developed as early as possible.

What kinds of group discussions do you thrive in in your own learning? Why?

How might you scaffold group conversation in your own classroom?

When is group work effective, and when is group work a challenge?

What are some of the challenges related to group work for ELLs?

What is one way you can design an academic group work situation in your own discipline?

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

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.

My biggest take away with this reading was the importance of questions and silence. Asking questions impacts the way our lessons can go and can be very good indicators of where we want to take the class. Asking the right questions is very important as it engages our students in higher levels of thinking and can helps us build on what our students already know (scaffolding). I find that too many of the questions on worksheets teachers give to their students to be quite closed-ended with next to no room for interpretation. Of course, there is a need for those type questions in the younger years of high school so that students will be able to identify quickly the main elements presented in a text – plot, theme, character, etc. Asking questions in class helps teachers to model the appropriate type of academic language that is needed to be used in the classroom.

Of course, the one question that teachers dread asking would have to be, “Does anyone have any questions?” More often than not, teachers will ask the question and leave very little room (usually one second) for response from their students. At the same time, teachers fear the dreaded “I don’t get it” response from their students. Sometimes we just need to have uncomfortable silences in the classroom to foster healthy discussion. As teachers we need to be open to receiving that type of feedback from our students for the betterment of ourselves and for the betterment of our lesson plans. More so, as inquiring teachers, we need to constantly question what we do/how we do/why we do in the classroom and figure out what worked and what didn’t and how could this have been done differently and how do you get better engagement from your students.

So I want to just throw this out there: does anyone else find this book to be the plethora of possible teaching activities? I mean this thing is the holy grail of do’s and don’ts as a teacher. Pretty epic in my mind. Anyways group work, it’s a fail, succeed or kinda sorta work activity that requires way more thought then most people think. There are so many factors that go into a good discussion and this chapter does a really effective job of covering some of the major stepping stones required to build good classroom discussions. I would personally like to focus on one, which intrigued me. This idea of promoting and fostering proper classroom discussion across multiple subjects and years. As teachers we can come up with the best questions, perfect ways to present findings and the safest environments to have discussions; but if students aren’t exposed to discussions throughout their day or throughout their schooling career, how can we expect them to know what to do? Many students are very apprehensive about jumping into a discussion even amongst close friends or small groups, quite often because they’ve never really given it a try and the idea is some what scary and novel to them. I believe to promote engaging and student orientated discussions we need to foster the ideas of what makes a good discussion early on in education. If a grade 8 student is introduced to discussion based talks that encompass many of the ideas for a good discussion it is likely to start out slow and gradually build. If these same ideas are promoted and instilled from classroom to subject to year, imagine the types of discussions we could be having in grades 11 and 12? I don’t think this is an easy task, nor will it happen overnight, but I firmly believe if schools want to promote discussion it needs to be done school wide and developed over many years, not just one teacher, in one subject, for one year of their high school or middle school life.

Last Wednesday we had class with Graham.  In this class we spent sometime doing activities or games that involved the whole class and not only taught us something but were also fun.  These games varied in the sense that some of them needed no words at all and then others needed some explanation.  One of the games that we did was called “line or scale.”  Basically during this activity people line up based on a statement to show where they stand.  For example, Graham asked us if we expect to use a lot of lectures in our classrooms.  People lined up on one side of the class if they planned to mainly use lectures, on the other people who planned to never use lectures, and then everyone was in between.  Then we shared our thoughts and ideas with those around us.  This allowed us to talk to others that we may not normally speak to.  As well if changed some peoples perspectives on lecturing!

In the book Building Academic Language the author states that it is important to build a whole class discussion.  There are many reasons why a whole class discussion can be very useful for learners.  These discussions can help students build their thinking skills, help them modify their ideas, as well as help them to articulate these ideas.  A whole class discussion is a little like improvisation.  You have to be paying attention to what is going on.  One minute you may be talking about one thing and the next minute you are on to something else.  Mainly, in whole class discussions and in improv people need to stay on their toes, they need to think and then rethink their next move and everyone needs to be committed together.  All in real time!  Zwiers says that this imitates real life situations which will help students in the future!