Collaborative Groups in Your Classroom
Some thoughts about group work
Collaborative grouping. What feeling do those two words evoke in you? Are you:
Fully jazzed. This is how your classroom operates, the foundation of what you do. You think, “I have great systems in place for this, and I know that students are learning from and with each other”
A little uncomfortable. You use collaborative groups regularly…but, “Maybe this is not the best way for students to learn. I think I can set things up better for students, and I am not quite sure that students are learning what they need to.”
Uggghhh. I know I am supposed to find ways for students to learn from and with each other, but really, I design that one project every trimester or so where part of it is collaborative. But it is more trouble than it is worth to me.
Or are you somewhere in all of these categories, depending on the students in a particular class, thinking, “I cannot quite figure out when this is for the best and when it is not?”
As is the case with many instructional decisions, there are many factors that become part of decisions about collaborative grouping. Starting with this one:
What is the purpose?
Why are you asking students to work together and learn from and with each other?
All other answers stem from here. If this grouping work is part of a daily classroom lesson, then the way in which you will navigate it is different than if it is for a multi day or even one day project.
Groups that are set up for daily work as part of the classroom routine are true working groups. I will call them daily working groups. These students will navigate classroom learning as a unit. This group’s ability to learn from and with each other will impact their ability to learn and apply new content. They need to be able to rely on each other, to navigate new material together, and to ensure that everyone in the group understands. These are higher stakes than the one day or even multi-day project groups.
Because of the need for these daily working groups to truly rely on each other to navigate, apply, and learn new information and skills, it is helpful for them to be smaller. Think two, maybe three students. When I see groups of four in this type of scenario, I inevitably see a 3:1 ratio. Either three students are working and one is completely disengaged, even disruptive. Or the reverse. One student is working and the other three are benefiting. Either way, not everyone is learning. I personally prefer groups of two, or the “seat partner” as it is called in many classrooms. But the inevitable problem here is absences…when one student from a two person group is missing, then there is no collaboration, and one student is left to learn alone.
Students grouped together for one day or multi day projects are often collaborating to share the workload and enable the introduction of various perspectives and skill sets to, usually, the generation of a product or presentation. This project group needs to be clear on the task at hand, to be able to navigate the workload within a timeline, and to communicate with each other about how to do each. But, while a project such as this often comes connected with a meaningful grade, this is more of a one and done. Students need to work well together for this task, not forever.
Think carefully about who makes up each of these groups. Do you want students who are at similar levels of ability? Do you want students with similar learning profiles? Are you going to allow students to choose their own groups?
Both ability levels and learning profiles depend on the makeup of the class and the purpose of the assignment. Placing a very strong student, perhaps with more content knowledge, into each group is fraught with concerns. These students also need to learn what is next for them, and in a group of students with less knowledge or ability they will wind up either doing all the work, being the teacher, or becoming frustrated and disengaged. And if this strong student is doing the work, then no one else is, meaning no one else is doing the learning. Better, in my experience, to group more advanced students together, to assign them a more challenging or content extension task, and let the other groups also become true learning groups.
Allowing students to choose their own groups….I am going to say no to this in many scenarios. Just allowing this to unfold could be the source of some social scenarios in your classroom, especially in middle school. When you ask for groups of three, and there are four friends in a class, what happens? What happens to the student that is new, or shy, or unliked? This makes life harder for them, as you will need to intervene to make sure they have a group to work with. And truly, these are often the students who most need to engage in collaborative work.
So, to me, except for a high interest, short term, primarily low stakes assignment, well assigned groups are for the best. By high school, for long term projects that involve some action or commonality of interest, self selecting will begin to make more sense.
Routines to support collaborative work
How have you set up the routines for this collaborative work? What understandings do students have about their roles and responsibilities within this group?
Setting students up in groups and then letting them loose is rarely successful. The exception to this might be if the task is asking them to design a new government or society, in which case this struggle is part of the learning and becomes material for their decision making. Other than that, the struggle to organize tends to take away from the other learning. Just like other aspects of your classroom, norms and routines around how we work together are essential.
Many teachers, especially when using daily working groups, assign roles. Each student in the group is responsible for one aspect of the work. Someone might be the time keeper, the recorder, the question asker, or the organizer. Call them what you will, and some teachers really design some creative names. In defining roles you have broken down the components of the behaviors needed to collaborate successfully, and by explicitly addressing them, can better ensure that they are applied. In this way, each student is required to remain participatory as the group works, since everyone has a role and responsibility. Now, these roles could initially come from students as the class defines what is required in a collaborative effort. Students can define what is important, and in doing so, design class norms around this work.
For longer term collaborative projects, I have found it helpful to make a project planner part of the supporting work students do in their project groups. This planner, revisited regularly as part of the process, lays out what steps need to be taken, who is responsible for each, the timeline, and other essential project completion steps. (Incidentally, a project planner is also essential for independent long term projects…anything that lasts more than a day or two. This is an important skill that many of us learn the hard way, so some explicit focus on it is helpful!)
These are the basic considerations, but I guarantee that there are teachers in your school who have been working to refine these processes for years. Stop by and talk it through with them, learn what has worked and what does not.
How do I grade collaborative work?
This is a topic for which I have not found the perfect answer or balance. Here are just some general thoughts.
I happen to work in a school where we have a separate rubric for learner behaviors, of which one is collaboration. This means that students are rated and given feedback on their collaboration separately from their learning and demonstrated understanding of the content. The rubric for the project, therefore, which determines their grade, does not blend these collaborative skills into the grade, which remains focused on the demonstration of knowledge, skills, or understanding. A student who is not doing a great job “listening to the contributions of others” will get feedback specific to that collaboration marker, which will help them to know what and where to improve…even if their skills and knowledge are as expected.
The key is this. It is essential to know and understand what each student knows and understands on their own. The journey may be collaborative, but the assessment of what they know and are able to do is individual. What structure is in place to assess students individually even at the conclusion of a collaborative project or assignment? Now, this will vary based on the purpose of the assignment, but it is important. This is true for the more obvious reason of assessing student knowledge. But it also helps mitigate some of the conflict that comes with collaborative work. Because despite all of the structures and frameworks discussed above, and more, there will still be groups where you hear, “I did all the work” or “she contributed a picture? That’s it?”. Making it clear that grades are not wholly based on how your group functions can ease some of this pressure.
As you navigate the creation and assignment of collaborative work, consider where else in your school students are expected to collaborate. Are there guidelines connected with that work, potentially in Phys Ed, Project Adventure, or science lab classes, that might be helpful to you? Are there teachers in your school that use collaborative groups regularly, think English teachers who use book groups as part of their basic structure? Each of these examples can provide for you ideas that will help you to design collaborative work for students in your classroom that are productive and move learning forward, rather than cause frustration.
Because you can consider all of this and more, and create the most well designed groups and collaborative assignments possible. And still, it will not be perfect. Collaboration never is, for any of us at any age. And that is part of the learning.