Design effective groups for in-class activities

I want to develop better mechanisms to facilitate group work inside my classes. I have spent the last 8 years of my career developing custom curriculum to provide direct instruction to my students. This includes both online videos and digital textbook manuscripts that students can access 24-hours per day, 7-days per week at no upfront cost. One of the most exciting features of this work to flip the classroom is that, because content delivery happens at home in individual space, we can repurpose the group space during in-class meetings to work on more complex learning tasks. To this end, I adapt work from Jo Boaler, Nicole Gray, and Chris Edmin to design effective groups in my classes. The goal in forming groups is to empower students to take ownership over the responsibilities of creating highly engaging learning environments and to propel their individual effort with consistent feedback from multiple perspectives during every in-class meeting. In this post, we explore how to form effective groups and assign unique roles to each group member.

Create Groups of Four Students

I plan to ask students to form groups of four. I advocate for groups with four members because:

• A group of four is small enough to permit meaningful dialog in which each member has a chance to make significant contributions on a daily basis.

• A group of four consists of six separate pairs of people. Suppose we label each group member with a number: 1, 2, 3, 4. Then there are six different possible pairings: (1,2), (1,3) (1,4), (2,3), (2,4), (3,4). This implies that for think-pair-share exercises, we can have work in cycles of three

• First exercise: (1,2), (3,4)
  • Second exercise: (1,3), (2,4)
  • Third exercise: (1,4), (2,3)

• If one person is absent then think pair share exercises can be run with teams of three. Three people is still small enough that each member has a chance to contribute.

• In a group of four, each member can act as a steward of a different part of the learning environment, as evidenced by the roles delineated below. This permits us to have a whole class dynamic where every group is meaningfully contributing to the functioning of the class and each group member is contributing in a different way.

The titles, traits, and responsibilities for each role within a group are given below. I plan to turn this post into a handout distributed to each student during the first day of class. Before the second in-class meeting, students need to read this handout and decide on which role(s) they might want to play within their group. One of the major goals of the second in-class meeting is for students to choose groups and decide on roles within each group.

The Encourager

Traits:

• This role is good for folks who have or are willing to develop a growth mindset.
• This role is great for learners who can be patient, detailed-oriented, supportive, and encouraging.
• This role requires that you build trust with group members. The person in this role should be able to help others feel safe being vulnerable.
• The person in this role will also be collecting ideas from each group member on how to improve the class as a whole. This person will also be responsible for following through on putting these ideas into action as we transform the learning environment together.
• This should also be comfortable speaking truth to authority.
• This person should be able and willing to engage consistently in class and be able to stay after class one day per week.

Responsibilities:

• Remind your team to develop multiple approaches for each math idea?
  • How might we reach this result using a different method?
  • What other categories of thought might we bring into this problem?
  • How can we visualize this result?
  • What type(s) of verbal explanations have we developed?
  • Have we stated this in both abuelita and nerdy language?

• Remind your team to search for connections between different mathematical ideas
  • How are these ideas connected to previous concepts we’ve studied?

• Remind your team to find reasons why each mathematical statement is true
  • How clear are we on why we believe these results to be true?
  • How have we articulated our reasoning in the work we do?
  • How do our results demonstrate fluency beyond procedural computations?

• Look for the intuition behind errors in work
  • What error(s) exist in this work?
  • Where did these errors come from?
  • What insights and genius can we identify in the source of these errors?
  • How might we correct these errors?
  • What did we learn from this correction process?

• Act as a representative for your group: collect ideas on how to improve the class

• Meet with our class improvement committee (including instructor) to improve the way the class runs. These co-generative dialogs (co-gen) meetings happen once each week immediately after our one normally scheduled class. We’ll decide on the exact day and time of these meetings as a collective during the first two weeks of the quarter.

The Facilitator

Traits:

• This role is good for folks who are comfortable managing work for teams of people.
• This person should be able to “read the air” and balance the needs of the group with the needs of individuals in that group.
• This person should also be able to build trust with others in their group.
• This role also requires the ability to pay attention to time constraints and keep the groups focus on important tasks during in-class meeting time.
• The person in this role needs to have the time and energy to be able to stay ahead of the videos on the timescale decided on by the group. Because these folks will be creating YouTube time stamps for the whole class, this person will need to be about 1 – 3 days ahead of their group members for watching videos at home and producing notes.

Responsibilities:

• Make sure that your group reads all the way through the problem list each day. This reading should be out loud and together.
  • Who wants to read today?

• Make sure the reading/speaking responsibility gets shared.
  • We haven’t heard from you in a bit Jeff. Might you be willing to take the lead this time?

• Don’t let one person dominate the discussion
  • You’ve been talking a lot Jeff. Why don’t we give someone else a chance to contribute?

• Make sure the instructions are clear before group begins:
  • How are we feeling about today’s task?
  • Do each of us get what we’re supposed to do today?

• Keep your group together
  • How is progress going?
  • We have X minutes left. How are you all feeling about this task?

• Make sure each group member’s ideas are heard
  • Did anyone see a different way to do this?
  • What other ways might you explain this?
  • What questions come up for you as you think through what we just heard?

• Keep portfolio progress log for each member of the group. Update the groups progress report on our class’s online resources page(s).
• Each facilitator is also responsible to contribute time-stamp information on our YouTube videos.

The Resourcer

Traits:

• This role requires consistent attendance during in-class meetings.
• This role also requires consistent engagement with the learning videos outside of class.
• This role is good for folks who tend to attend class consistently with very few absences.
• This role is also good for students who are consistently able to set and meet deadlines.
• This role may require showing up a bit early for class to prepare learning materials and get ready for group work as a team.
• This role may also require staying a bit late after class to clean up and organize class resources.

Responsibilities:

• Get learning materials ready for your team during each in-class meeting.
  • What materials do we need for our learning today?
  • Do all group members have access to everything they need to participate today?

• Make sure all questions are team questions.
  • How can we define this task as a group activity?
  • What specific tasks should we do individually and which should be done together as a group?

• Meet with instructor to get detailed instructions about how to use the resources for in-class learning activities.
  • What guidance, concerns, and directions does Jeff have for this learning activity?
  • How can I help the instructor care for our class resources?

• Prepare a detailed and accurate attendance report for each day of class.

• Update our online attendance report for each day’s meeting.

• Act as a representative for your team in case someone is absent. Reach out to any absent member and check in about how they are. Coordinate access to that days’ resources for folks who are absent.

The Understander (aka the reporter)

Traits:

• This role is great learners who can write and think at the same time.
• This role is also great learners who like to get artistic and take pride in their notes
• This role is great for learners who want to create written resources and a work log that make it easier for others in their group to understand.
• This person should be relatively comfortable using online tools (like Google docs) to upload images of each day’s work that can be shared with every person in the group and with the instructor.
• This role also requires a high level of integrity: the reporter will be responsible for creating an attendance log for each day of class. This log should be as accurate as possible with no distortions or misrepresentations of the actual participation during class.

Responsibilities:

• During each day of class, each group member produces two types of artifacts to demonstrate learning. The first type of artifact is your own personal learning log that demonstrates your understanding of the material and represent your learning. The second type of artifact is your group’s progress for that day of class.

• Group Work: Your group needs to organize all your results and capture the output of your work.

• Your group results need to include a record of each group members ideas and contributions.

• You group work also needs to use colors, arrows, diagrams, and other math tools to communicate your mathematics, reasons, and connections.

• How do we want to show that idea?

• Be ready to join the teacher for a huddle.

• Produce a complete log by the end of each day’s in-class meeting that can be shared with the entire group and with the instructor. Ideally, these logs will be uploaded (in digital form) onto our online class system at the end of each day’s work. That provides immediate access to the work for that day and acts as a time stamp as the quarter goes on.

• You will be responsible for helping make the reporting process better in the class.

Next Steps

Using these general contours, I plan to have my students create there own groups. These descriptions alone are necessary but not sufficient for launching effective group work in class. To expand on this work, we need to answer the following questions:

• How will students form these groups?
• What will the first group activities be during weeks 1 and 2 of the class?
• How do we balance the use of group assignments with students’ work on their individual portfolios?
• How does all this work fit into the process of grading and assessment?
• What does the teacher do while students are working in groups?
• How does the co-generative dialog (co-gen) process work?
• How can we build effective online resources that all members of the class can manage?

Those are questions that I plan to explore in future posts.