Group Work

I think group work is essential in a secondary classroom. It has to be used multiple times throughout the semester.  There are multiple benefits that students will gain from these experiences.  Students will learn how to work as a team to complete a task. They will learn how to deal with conflict and experience working with different personalities.
Also, they will learn how to work with people that they do not want to work with.  This will give them the skills necessary to adapt and change to accommodate that type of situation.  They may find after working together with people they don’t want to that they never got to know that student and their relationship could change.  Another
benefit of group work is that it engages students in their learning.  They are doing the work and it is their responsibility to complete it together.  Group work also improves communication skills.  Students will have to talk with each other to
exchange ideas and knowledge.  The list goes on and on.

All of these skills they will learn from group work will prepare them for college, and later for the workforce.  As much as some people dread working in groups, it gets easier the more you do it. You learn different personality types and how to work with them.  Most careers will involve some type of collaboration, even if it is as simple as getting along with your co-workers.  One of the purposes of education is to prepare students to be productive in the workforce.  A large part of this comes from group work. 

I have had two recent experiences implementing group work with 7^th graders in my fieldwork.  Overall, it worked out pretty well.  There were some important things that made it work well. I used techniques that I learned from the articles we have all read in our education classes, my mentor teacher, our education professors, and substitute teaching.  I started by greeting students at the door and handing each student a small square of colored construction paper. When it came time for group work about halfway through class, this is what I used to divide them into groups randomly.  Students with green paper were one group, orange with orange, ect.  I did not tell them ahead of time what the paper was for because I thought they would try to switch paper to be with the friends.  I wanted this to be random so they would work with students they may not want to. I also wanted them to wonder what was going to happen later in class.  Next, I had them put their desks so they were facing each other. Each group was given a document to look at and a sheet that was used to answer questions about it.  I only gave them one sheet of questions so they all had to help giving answers while one person wrote it down.  Both my fieldwork teacher and I circulated the room helping the groups and making sure everyone was participating.  I could see the different personalities in this group work.  Some students were quiet and not speaking, while others were dominating and writing the answers themselves.  That’s why it is important to monitor group work to prevent these situations.  What I was most impressed about was this one
student, who always cuts up in class and gets into trouble often with the teacher.  In the group work, he was
helping to answer the questions with his group and he was behaving great.  He asked me a lot of questions that he was interested in as a result of the document.  This was the first time I had seen him actively involved in class and
enjoying it. 

There are some ways to assess group projects.  First, circulating the room to assess who is participating and who is not is a good start to finding out who is doing the work.  Even if some students are not participating, the teacher can prompt them to get them involved in their group be asking questions or seeing if their something they do not
understand.  Second, having students fill out evaluation sheets that include both what they did and what the other
students did is a way to see how much work everyone did.  Third, having students fill out evaluation sheets of each other could be used to help the teacher grade the project.  Lastly, the teacher could give an individual grade and a group grade on the project and average them together for each student.