Last week was generally a very good week. There was only one lesson that I thought could have worked differently if I had organized it differently. I got my Socials 9 class to do a carousel activity where at each station groups would read a section in the textbook then write down a question for the next group to answer. The all the following groups would then read the section, answer the question, and write a new question for the next group. In theory, this would have been a great learning activity. However, what started happening was that students started wandering and certain individuals started doing all the work for their groups. Thinking back, some things that I may decide to do to combat these issues are:
- Get students seated and enforce that they be seated when doing the group work
- Have a different student do the reading and writing at each table so that more people are involved and on task
- Have a brain break half way through the activity so that students aren’t always focused on the content at hand
When I was taught this activity at UBC, I thought it was a great activity because it got students moving and thinking at the same time. Potentially students would have less inactivity because they are moving to the next station (physical activity) and then reading and writing at the stations (mental activity). The problem with how it was taught to me was that it was very generally taught, instructors did not go into detail on different ways to keep students on task, or how to actually organize it. All of my suggested changes to the activity came from my own reflection and discussion with my Socials SA.
I think that you have hit upon a couple of things that teachers have to consider when planning a group activity or project. I don’t know how you formed the groups but regardless of how you did you have to think about clearly defining how you expect the groups to work; that is to say your behavioural expectations. Often we choose to and should form the groups the groups for a variety of reasons. When this happens we need to be very clear about how each group should work and then enforce these expectations otherwise the likelihood of seeing behaviours like wandering will go up. That is not to say that we should allow students to form their own groups; often it better for us to from them for a variety of reasons, we just have to manage them.
Two other concepts of a cooperative structure that you have sort of identified that you should consider and plan for in the structure/design of your activity in the future are: individual accountability – everyone has to contribute for the group to succeed…one or two people can’t carry the whole group, and group interdependence – the contributions of each person mesh with the other group members so that they have to work together. Chunking a group project up between the members of the group and then putting it back together satisfies the individual accountability pieces but the tricky part is how to set up the project so that pieces mesh and the group has to work together.