It is the first day of the semester in a junior-level preservice teacher course, and 40 students sleepily shuffle in and choose spots at a table with their safety blanket—their friends. As I announce to not get too settled, I am met with muffled groans.
Employers love collaborators. Communities needs collaborators. Democracy requires collaboration.
Students hate collaboration.
And faculty feel . . . well . . . meh?
We know that collaboration is powerful. We know that it both provides students with skills they need and deepens their learning by
Active learning in small groups has, at best, a mixed reputation. Instructors voice concerns about unequal levels of participation, students rushing through activities to leave or log off early, difficulties in assessing effort and learning, and the fact that many students arrive in class not
It’s no wonder employers highly value college grads that are already good team players (Finley, 2021), not only because the ability to collaborate is key to professional success but also because developing this skill set is no easy task. As faculty, we know this all
Earlier this year we asked you to share in-class small group activities and your best advice on various details related to designing and managing group work. Here’s a set of activities culled from the submissions, along with recommendations on various aspects of group work.
Free riders—those who don’t do their fair share of work in a group—frustrate students, especially when they get the same grade as everyone else in the group. A lot of students don’t realize there are ways groups can deal with free riders—ways that make it
It’s well known that group work benefits the learning process but also that learners can dread the idea of doing group projects. So, as online instructors, what can we do about this situation? Research shows that group projects in online courses are fraught with mixed
Concerns over group dysfunction continue to worry faculty who use groups and prevent others from using them. We have some research-based evidence as to the problems students experience in groups. A 2008 study by Regina Pauli and colleagues used student responses to an empirically developed
I’ve been doing some work on resources related to group work and have been impressed yet again by the amount of scholarship being done on groups both in classrooms and online. Faculty use and study groups in virtually every field. And as a sidebar, I
What’s the best way to put students into groups? It’s the first task that confronts teachers who want students to work together. And the best reply is one of those “it depends” answers. Here are the questions on which it depends.
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