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Using Groups in your Teaching

Contact us anytime:

Erin DeSilva

erin.desilva@dartmouth.edu

Learning Design,

Educational Technologies

With thanks to Prudence Merton (DCAL), Petra Bonfert-Taylor (Thayer) and

Rebecca Taub (Brown)

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Learning outcomes:

By the end of this session, you will be able to:

identify the reasons for creating a group project in your course.
consider the factors required for a successful group project.
craft a plan for assessing the efforts of student groups.
explore technology that might assist your students in meeting your objectives.

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Six essential* questions when considering group work:

*According to our own experience and understanding. Seriously. Tell us what we’re missing.

Why are you doing this? What is the purpose?

Who are your partners in designing and executing?

What do you want to assess & evaluate? How?

How will groups get formed?

Identify the time on task and context.

Which technology will best support the task(s)?

DeSilva & Taub 2016

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Purpose: why use a group assignment?

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Examples of learning outcomes for a group:

By the end of this GROUP assignment/task, students will…

...practice peer programming by writing computer programs incorporating new language concepts.

...argue for and against particular points of view.

...support classmates through navigation of problem solving.

What learning outcomes would you write for your course?

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Some reasons instructors use groups:

group conversation
summarize points from conversation
have conversation, then report back
fill out worksheets
draw things (e.g. site plans)
create concept maps
debate, generate hypotheses
look at data
figure out what they don’t know
generate questions

write paper
conduct field project together
stage a protest
role playing, simulations
analyze methodology
play games
group presentations
run demonstrations & labs

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People: who’s on your teaching team?

Who are your partners in designing and executing? multidisciplinary teams to design experience and train participants.

Everyone brings a separate set of skills, even Han Solo, Spiderman, Evil Spiderman (Devil’s advocates are critical!) and the space guy.

Who else do we need to involve?

Designing: Program coordinators, directors, Ed Tech, Inst Designer, Co-curricular educators, can help you think about these questions, especially the technology piece. A CTL professional might help advise on how best to measure.

Executing: Should this assignment incorporate peer leaders? TA’s? If so, do they need to be trained? How? What norms need to be created and what already exist?

Most importantly, what will be the instructor’s own role in the group assignment? Facilitating? How much independence will students get?

Role of group work in and out of class - we are hoping to discuss in-class group work tomorrow

Learning Fellows

Get your instructional designer on board

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Assessment & Evaluation

How group work is assessed and evaluated “can make the difference between students’ feeling that they are just going through their paces and the sense that they are engaged in a powerful exchange of ideas.”

(Brookfield & Preskill, 1999, p. 107)

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How will I assess the assignment/task?

Assess individual, as well as group, learning and performance:

individual component to group projects
combine a group project with an individual test or quiz

Assess process as well as product:

team evaluations: members evaluates dynamics of the team as a whole
peer evaluations: members evaluate the contributions of teammates
self-evaluations: member documents and evaluates own contributions

Make your assessment criteria and grading scheme clear:

How is grade based on group’s performance vs. individual components?
assessments of product vs. assessments of process
weight of peer evaluations or self-evaluations

How will will you assess? Should you grade?

Diligent students can be demotivated by group projects if they feel that their own success is dependent on team members who don’t do their share. -> assess individual students’ learning and performance in addition to group’s output.

If developing teamwork skills is one of your learning objectives you should assess students’ progress towards that goal -> assess process. Assessments can be quantitative or qualitative.

Make grading clear. Especially important when assessing work that is not typically assessed in classes (such as ability to resolve conflict).

Group assessment?

Same grade?

Peer feedback?

Evaluation tools - Prue will get Harvard

Petra/Erin will grab from POD listserv

Print out things from here:

https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/design/instructionalstrategies/groupprojects/tools/index.html

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Group structure

How many students per group?
How will we form groups?
Fixed vs. changing membership?
Assigned roles?
Rules of engagement?

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How long should a group stay together?

Duration	Description	Good for...	Challenges
1 class	informal, formed quickly, random membership	Practicing conversations, reviewing knowledge Building allies Groupthink & promoting class conversation	More homogeneous groups work well here. Students might not know how they can contribute.
~1 week	meet in-class and outside of class, need to pay attention to group compositions	Building trust Addressing some complex material	Instructors need to help students talk explicitly about the group process. Students might not know how they can contribute.
whole term	form a community of learners, group compositions chosen carefully	Building trust Addressing complex material, including material beyond the class Accomplishing projects with multiple stakeholders	Need a charter, group norms Need to get started right away

Where does your group assignment/task fit? What are the affordances and/or challenges?

one class: informal, formed quickly, random membership, respond to question, brainstorm ideas, used for Think-Pair-Share and other CoLTs for example, ad-hoc, hard to do team maintenance or assessment

one week: achieve more complex goal (write report, develop presentation), work until task completed, group investigation, team-building skills possible, still take a relatively large proportion of time

whole term: form community of learners, achieve an overarching course goal, offer support to members and encouragement, can do all kinds of team assessments, process assessments, “fix” teams that don’t work, get all of the benefits, can spend time on group work skills, group contracts, etc. But also: The longer a team stays together the more conflicts might arise.

length of project effects some of the other criteria (one class only -> won’t have time for team building, team assessment, etc)

Notes from slide we took out:

INTENTIONALLY!

Which are important to your outcomes?

Speed
Previous knowledge & skills
Motivation
Diversity of Perspectives
Student Relationships
Personality

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Tuckman’s model of group development

Traditional model

Another approach to the model

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Context

Where is the time and space in your course?
Why is constructing knowledge in a social environment better in this case?
Where is the opportunity for reflection?
Do students have opportunities to articulate their reasoning to each other? Is that visible to you?

How long will this group be together? Synch vs. Asynch? What is the curricular time and coursework context? Time and space

Will students learn more from working collaboratively or individually? Can students construct knowledge together in a social environment and will they be more successful?

Learning is not a spectator sport when it comes to Active Learning. Can’t just sit on the side - reflect, relate, apply, etc. Designing the context of the course to allow for this is critical. (Chickering and Gamson)

Time should be arranged adequately for necessary tasks and deadlines should be clear (Cakiroglu, 2014).

Yang, Liang, and Chen (2010) noted that in a group, students must actively share ideas, explain their opinions, articulate their reasoning, and expound on knowledge.

Notes from Kes: how are students going to meet the objectives you have set in the assessment/evaluation phase?

“You must make sure they are doing it.” ~from Erin - instructor needs to be present & deliberate

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Technology: what’s right for groups?

Understand available tools

Understand how teams work

Choose the best technology and use it in the right way

http://www.ncolr.org/jiol/issues/pdf/13.2.2.pdf

Technology should be the last consideration, after all objectives and assessment plans are created. This isn’t always the case.

Here you see some of the technology we used in the cases we are about to present.

These are 5 technologies which really enhance a collaborative assignment/task.

If you are looking for a quick laundry list of Technology questions for a group assignment, we recommend asking:

Do we need to recommend/require/provide instructions for any of the following tools:

LMS?
Social Bookmarking or Annotation?
Surveys?
Writing?
Webinar? Web conferencing/meeting?

OR are we going to allow Student choice in the tools that they use?

Note from Kes:

If faculty have questions for what tool is best for their students, they can talk to instructional designer!

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Technology: what’s right for groups?

Learning Management System

Survey Tool

Webinars/Conference Calls

Collaborative Writing

File Sharing

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