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Facilitating Group Work

Many teachers find that using students as peer educators in or outside of class can be a productive strategy for encouraging active learning in their courses. Group work usually leads to more student participation and involvement with course issues, ideas, and skills. It also means shifting the balance of class management more toward students, and trusting them to be able to teach each other and learn from each other.

Using small groups, or even large ones to facilitate teaching and learning is not a new strategy. Most educators place ideal learning group size at between 3 and 7; more usually means that some students will not get to fully participate. However, effective group structure may vary according to what you expect them to do and the environment in which they will do it. Whatever the size you choose, there are unique communication and management needs that you should address to enhance the likelihood that your groups will be successful.

Technology can help.

Group Planning.
Creating the Groups: You can let students form their own groups or you can assign them to groups. Some teachers, with their students’ knowledge and permission, gather pertinent information regarding students’ past experiences and present knowledge by having them fill out simple on-line forms. The teachers then place the info in a database and use it to define group composition or enhance it. Some potentially helpful information, like PID#, college, class, major, and email address, is also available in the Electronic Class Rolls.

Group Process.
Supporting Group Communication: There are a number of software tools that can accommodate the need for students in groups to communicate and work with one another, to discuss projects and problem solutions and to share calculation and composition space. Using list servs and discussion forums, you can further encourage collegial communication among group members.

Meeting in Groups: Virtual group meetings can often be arranged using on-line multi-user Chat rooms, instant messaging, or other communication tools, which can be either synchronous or asynchronous. Face-to-face meetings, in which students can work collaboratively on computer-based projects, can also be arranged in some facilities on campus.

Making Resources Available: You can gather resources (information, data, references or web links) that will be valuable for each group’s work, and post these to a group web space, or to a list serv of group members.

Reviewing Group Work: You can use on-line communication tools or web space to have student groups post drafts of their work. You can then review student group work and provide feedback regarding progress on projects and assignments. IT communication tools will enable you to provide feedback to all groups at once, each group individually, or each student individually.

Group Product.
Web sites: The complexity of web site development makes it particularly attractive for collaborative group work. Students can share content and design development tasks that you or they define, and create a product that can be useful as a learning or research site for other students and teachers. Be sure you’re clear on the criteria by which you will evaluate such projects and share those criteria with your students before they begin. Also be sure they know where they can get the resources they need to complete the work.

Multimedia projects: Projects incorporating a variety of image enhancement and media development technologies can also be valuable for encouraging collaborative group work. Web- or CD-ROM-based videos, digital photography exhibitions, CD-ROM or web-based tutorials, software-supported presentations, on-line simulations and case studies are all possibilities.

Digital and hypertext papers: The nature of the digital environment encourages opportunities for multi-authored texts. Since the work is no longer bound by the rules of linearly presented text, multiple authors can make discrete yet supportive contributions in collaboration with one another. The texts can contain links to appendices, other locations in the text, graphics, photos, video, animations, web sites, and other student-created or located resources.

Glossary of Related Terms.

AFS space
Blackboard
Chat/Instant Messaging
Classroom and lab scheduling
Discussion forums
Electronic class rolls
Graphics software
Group workspace
Library instructional services
List servs
Security
Video conferencing
Web sites

 

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