Sunday, September 11, 2016

Week 1 Reflection: Groupwork

One of the books I read this summer was Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom by Elizabeth G. Cohen & Rachel A. Lotan. I have always wanted to do a more effective job of having my students work in groups.  I believe that rich group tasks are an authentic way for students to develop their mathematical thinking and it gives them an opportunity to work like mathematicians.  Too many times students develop the inaccurate belief that mathematicians sit alone in their offices pondering challenging mathematical ideas and concepts.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Mathematicians not only discuss ideas with each other, they also build on each other's work.  Sometimes over hundreds or thousands of years.

Through reading Designing Groupwork I began to understand how to develop the necessary skills in my students so that they could work in groups effectively.  I am a work in progress and will continue to reflect on the ideas of Cohen and Lotan.  In the appendix of the book, the authors provide activities that are constructed to develop students' abilities to work together effectively.  I decided to start the first week of school by using these activities with my students.

One of the biggest hurdles I had was in getting groups to share out their strategies they used in the activities during our whole group wrap up at the end of class.  Although students were engaged during the activity, it was quite the opposite when it came to the whole group.  My focus was on getting students to share their strategies so they could see that there were many "paths" to the solution.  This was important to me because I want to emphasize the importance of strategy over the solution.  So often students are so focused on "did I get the right answer" that they overlook the richness of the way (or ways) to get there.  I'm pretty patient and can sit with the "wait time" fairly well; letting the silence hang in the air in the hopes that a student will fill it.  But my goodness they just weren't opening up!

Somehow I stumbled on the idea of debriefing the groups individually as they finished the task and flushing out their particular strategy.  Then I would ask the individual group if they would be willing to share their strategy with the whole group because I thought there was value in other students hearing about it.  This worked extremely well!  I don't know if it was because I gave value to their strategy, asked "permission" for them to share, or built up their confidence so they felt comfortable sharing.  Whatever the reason, I was happy that I had more groups sharing during our whole group debriefing.

My other take away was coming to the realization that the success of a task or activity isn't always related solely to the activity itself.  It matters whether or not I feel some connection to the task.  There were a couple of activities that I just didn't feel a connection to and they did not go as well as the others.  They were perfectly good tasks, but I just didn't connect to them for some reason.  It makes me wonder if other educators have had this same observation.  Maybe my disconnection influenced how I navigated through the task and kept it from being as successful as it could have been.  And I wonder what was it specifically that kept me from connecting to it?  I'm not sure of the answer but I will continue to ponder the question as I try more tasks throughout the year.



1 comment:

  1. Lisa a great reflection. It sounds like you have hit two different problems.

    Firstly students are bad at metacognition. Most people just do stuff they don't analyse why they did it or whether it is effective. This takes time to develop and requires more prompting at both the start and end of the task. Perhaps getting each group role to have some questions for feedback about the other roles can help students to reflect on their own tasks.

    How a teacher feels is so underrated. You can't be super passionate about everything we are required to do and this can be observed by students. It fascinates me to read other classes work and see what their teacher thinks is important and engages the students with. This will happen.

    My holiday reading has become designing group work after your great posts, keen to see how it changes my class.

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