Grease is no longer the word. It’s now the rather more long winded High Impact Teaching Strategies or Evidence Based Strategies. Because we’re suckers for educational trends at Ticking Mind, we’ll be talking HITs and EBRs at our annual round of English Graduate Days (Northcote, Ringwood, Shepparton) starting next week. One evidence based strategy we’ll be discussing is group work. As anyone who has a pulse and has taught kids knows, if you put two or more students into a group and give them a task, things can rapidly go south. Collaborative learning can be highly effective. But the operative word here is can. We’ll be talking to graduates next week about three conditions for success in group work:
- Clear identification of a purpose for group work
- Effective explicit teaching and modelling of collaborative practices and a consistent return to the same collaborative procedures
- Accountability measures for the participation of individual students in group work
Here are some ideas for meeting the first two conditions of success:
Identification of purpose of group work:
Purpose | Collaborative activity |
Generate different ideas, different ways of thinking about an idea or topic | Turn and talk, Match ups, group sorts |
Be active in the teaching and learning process/Harness student expertise | Reciprocal summarisation, Jigsaw, peer feedback |
More efficiently complete tasks, cover content | Peer feedback, group study |
Effective explicit teaching and modelling of collaborative practices and a consistent return to the same collaborative procedures:
Rather than using lots (say 3 or more) types of collaborative procedures throughout the year, use the same few ones again and again so students get better at these procedures. Group work is difficult – and students will often work initially less productively in groups than they would have individually. However, over time the gains from group work can be much greater than if students do a similar task on their own. For example, one reading comprehension procedure which can be highly effective is Reciprocal Reading (read about it here: http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/reciprocal_teaching). Here’s an example of a teacher modelling to students how to go about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oXskcnb4RA. Students are unlikely to nail this procedure on the first or second attempt. But each successive time they do it, they’ll get better at it as we affirm what they’re doing right and correct ineffective group work behaviours. Group work is a long term strategy.