Supporting Learning Teams
Many instructors make the mistake of just assigning group members to learning teams and then waiting for delivery of the final project. But students don’t have the skills necessary to manage their groups effectively without support, especially while they are also engaged in the content of the collaborative research project. If you are going to hold students accountable for learning in groups, teach students how to work in groups.
Establishing a Climate for Successful Learning Teams
With that in mind, consider the following for initially motivating learning teams:
- Have students depict their “best ever” and “worst ever” group experiences in a quickwrite, concept map, or other method. Encourage them to draw on both academic and nonacademic experiences. Then, in a whole-group discussion, solicit their experiences, keeping a record on the board of characteristics of successful and unsuccessful group experiences.
- Share your thoughts about the importance of collaboration and learning communities in your own work, and call attention to the ways that you’ve had to learn to be a good team member — how that individual work on yourself is progressing, goals that you have for your future work in groups, etc.
- Ask students if they have concerns about the group work that you will be doing in class—whether small, ungraded activities or larger, graded projects. Encourage them to voice their concerns about roles that others take and ways that processes can fall apart. Doing this increases accountability with members who might otherwise slack off or derail.
- Focus on communication in group processes, and ask students to come to consensus (beforehand) about the best approaches to dealing with dominant members, silent members, vultures, etc.
- Ask each person to write a group-work goal on an index card and pass it into you. Use those goals to form groups, to think about future reflections, to check in mid-process, etc.
Maintaining the Climate
Once your course learning teams are moving toward their projects, keep in mind a few more “management” techniques:
- To increase accountability, ask for progress reports early on, and be sure to include reports on the function of the group. If feasible, use Blackboard’s group pages to make groups accountable through visibility.
- Rather than allowing students to privately criticize the group in your office hours or through documents, make the feedback public in the group.
- Allow some time in class for group meetings and planning (even if it’s just five or ten minutes at the end of each class).
- Ask students to provide each other with casual, oral feedback after each learning team meeting, in person (if the learning team has met in class) or via Blackboard. Each student can simply make a one- or two- sentence evaluations of the contributions of others in the group.
The first time you ask students to do this, ask students to share positive feedback only in order to establish trust and break the ice.
- Make yourself accessible to groups both in person during in-class groupwork time, as well as through email, office hours, in-person group check-ins, and the Blackboard small groups feature.
- Don’t try to squeeze learning team projects into a few weeks. Groups need time to form, storm, and norm before they perform (and adjourn). If you don’t have time in your syllabus to support groups, then don’t assign them.
- Share the final products of the group work with the entire class and teach student audience members how to provide meaningful critique.
- Work with students to create a meaningful group evaluation form or adapt one that you find online or in a group process textbook.
- Don’t just grade on the final deliverable. Make your assessment plan process-centric – make effective group interaction and cooperation a criterion in grading. Consider grading individuals on their constructive critiques of other groups’ presentations as well.
