5 Tips #​1 Working with Groups

In the first blog in this category I wrote a simplified overview of the changing landcape of schools over the past 30 years.  

In a modern school there is great use of working in groups so that:

• The teacher can include a wider variety of students in the same class
• Students learn to appreciate differences as a valuable resource in collaborative work such as they will need in their work as an employee or employer for example

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Groups

One way of including a range of different students is to work with groups.

Groups function like small classes within the classroom.
​The groups can be homogeneous, or diverse.

• Initially, the groups can be formed at random, although it is likely that a teacher with knowledge of the students in their class will make certain judicious choices so that each group has a fair chance of succeeding with the activity. 
• The group should be small but not too small. Depending on the size of the class, 4 to 6 groups can be made with 4 to 6 students in each group. That covers class sizes from 16 to 36 students.
• The groups should not be permanent, indeed a group could be formed for less than the length of the lesson, or for 10-20 minutes.
• There is an initial effort involved in building groups, when the teacher is not used to forming groups, and when the students are not yet used to working in groups.
• However, over time, the resistance to working in groups diminishes. And by the third or fourth time group activities are used, both parties will be more comfortable with the process and the benefits of working in groups will begin to show. 

Four Corners Activities
An effective way to get started working with groups is to use a Four Corners activity with the teacher as controller or director. In these activities, the students are encouraged to stand in one of four corners in the room depending on which response or answer they wish to give to the teachers prompt or question. 

It should be noted that a Four Corners activity should include a mix of questions of a factual nature with prompts for opinions that are not provocative or controversial. Having said that, Four Corners is an excellent way of promoting deep conversations on controversial issues. That is not our purpose here.  


Example

Question “What is the capital of France?”
A) Paris B) Berlin C) London or D) give me a clue

Prompt “The school lunch yesterday was...)?”
A) delicious B) edible C) nutritious or D) palatable 

Getting started
Start small, and develop group activities gradually.

​The first Four Corners group activity might be done at any time during the lesson - when the students need to move around for example - so the teacher and the students can begin to experiment with dividing up the class in different ways. 

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Coming up

In the next blogs in this category I will write about

• Instructions and roles within the groups
• Collaboration instead of competition
• Study materials and support
• Range of assessment