When you are integrating cooperative-collaborative groups into your instructional activities in the classroom, then regardless of their size, composition, and place of meeting, it is critical to monitor the groups’ progress. When you are using groups within the regularly scheduled class meeting, move quickly throughout the entire classroom during the initial phases to gauge all groups’ understanding of the assignment and outcome to be produced. Then, observe from a distance and circulate more deliberately to help any groups that get stuck.

Rather than simply providing information, ask questions that will stimulate students to uncover clues for solving their own problems. You will no doubt see some students emerge as teachers of their peers within each group. This benefits all students: teaching others helps students synthesize their own mastery of concepts, and learning from peers helps students understand information and concepts they might not have understood from a lecture or textbook.

When students are involved in cooperative/collaborative learning outside the regularly scheduled class meetings, you must be diligent to ensure that everyone understands the tasks, roles, objectives, time frame, and so on. Some professors make time to meet with individual groups working on long-term projects. Others establish specific times for the group leaders to consult on challenges. Still others use e-mail to allow student teams to convey overall progress, problems, issues, and the like.

Following any group learning experience, it is essential to facilitate a debriefing that enables students to develop a sense of accomplishment, and place their discoveries in a proper context. Ask questions, both rhetorical and pointed, to bring the activity to a satisfactory level of closure. A debriefing might include additional out-of-class research to develop a more comprehensive solution, which the group can present at the opening of the following class meeting.

In your first efforts to employ one of the various modes of small group learning, you are likely to feel unnecessary once the groups get going. You may even feel guilty about either not being “in charge” of the classroom or not “covering” more material. Some students, imprinted (or imprisoned) by a consumer mindset, might imply that you have somehow shirked your responsibilities by not directing the class. After observing the quality of the discussion, monitoring students’ overall reaction, and speaking with experienced facilitators, you will likely overcome your negative feelings rather quickly, and find yourself looking for additional opportunities to employ cooperative/collaborative learning.

One last recommendation concerning cooperative/collaborative work: evaluate group cooperation and collaboration along with the final product. Students consider graded activities to be important. Therefore, if we do not assess their cooperation and collaboration along with other aspects of their work, they will not attend to increasing their skills in this area. You must determine what percentage of the overall grade will be for teamwork. Then, you have to assess teamwork behaviors.

A handout for the project could say, for example:There is a reason why I am having you complete this task as a group. I believe that in many cases two or more heads are better than one. So that you know I am serious about what I am saying, 40 percent of your grade will be based on the effectiveness of your collaborative effort. I will make that judgment by considering the following:

• Observations of your group interactions when you are in the classroom.
• Explication of the role(s) that each group member played in the final product. For example: Each member of the group will write an explication of what everyone in the group did (including self). Weekly scores given by each member of the group to the rest of the members. Those scores will be divided as follows: Assuming that you have four members in your group, each member of the group will have 100 points to divide up among all the members of the group. Each person MUST give him/herself 25 of the points and then award the other 75 points based on a rubric-driven evaluation of how well each of the other members of the group contributed to the project. Sharing the aggregated scores on a weekly basis provides invaluable feedback to individual members of the group, which provides increasingly specific focus and motivation. The overall sense that the rest of the class and I have about whether or not you are working “seamlessly” as a team when you do your final presentation will be noted. We’ve all, unfortunately, witnessed group presentations that were done by a collection of individuals who had divided up the workload and never communicated about what was being done or what was being learned. What I want to see is a group presentation in which it seems that as if any one of you could take over any one of the other roles, because you are so familiar with all parts of the material and those parts fit together.

More and more students arriving in college and university classrooms are used to working with other students – but they may not know how to be members of a true team. Employers are looking for people who can be contributing members of work teams. There is much we can do to give our students this experience within our programs. That’s what strategic professors do.

Author: Meggin McIntosh
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Digital Camera News