Making Group Work WORK - #SundayFunday

It's weird to me to think about how we are such social creatures, and yet, adults and children alike have such a hard time working with other people in a group.  I've had many a classes where "group work" meant sitting with other people, but ignoring them while you do your own work.  Often the task is split between the group members, and each person does an unequal share of the work.  If the task can be divided and completed independently, I might argue that it is not a group-worthy task.

Although we live in communities and most of us have probably never gone a full day without interacting with someone, working with other people does not come naturally to most.  In the classroom, that means students need to be taught to work in groups.

Here are just a couple of links to activities designed to teach students how to work in groups.

Sara VanDerWerf's 1-100 Activity

• The Task: Students work together to circle the numbers from 1-100 in order.  
• Your Job: Take pictures of students working in their groups and use these photos to facilitate a discussion about what good group work looks like.
• My Experience: Because taking photos of my students is kind of iffy, I do weird things as I walk around the room to see how many students notice.  For example, I might do some walking lunges or pat my head.  During the discussion, I ask how many students noticed that I was doing these strange things.  Usually not many students do, which leads to the questions, "Why do you think you didn't notice your teacher acting like a weirdo?  What were you doing that made you ignore some of the distractions around you?"

Sarah Carter's Broken Circles Activity

•  The Task: Students work silently to use the pieces in each of their envelopes to create a full circle.  Students must give away and accept others' pieces to do so. 
• Your Job: You don't have to do much during the task, but use Sarah's Broken Circles Reflection sheet to facilitate a discussion afterwards.
• My Experience: Some groups will figure this out in less than 5 minutes.  Others will take closer to 10 minutes.  Bigger groups definitely make the task more difficult. 

Rating Group Work Norms

Sarah identifies the Group Work Norms that Broken Circles is designed to practice.  I used her Group Work Norms posters to create another short activity for my students.

 

First I asked students to rate the importance of each of these norms independently.  I explained that they could have as many 1's, 2's, or 3's as it took to rate all of the norms.  Next I had my students partner with someone else.  I asked them to compare their ratings and then focus on two norms: one whose importance both partners agreed upon (same rating) and one whose importance they disagreed on (different ratings).  Afterwards, partners shared with the class.