Group Work

I have never been a big fan of group work in a math class. I think it's mostly because I'm not good at coordinating it or making it effective.

I'm currently involved with coaching project where a group of teachers are helping each other become better at their practice. One of my goals through the project is to improve the way I use group work in my classes. Last week I assigned group work and it failed miserably.

The task I gave was a simple one. I gave students a distance vs. time graph which displayed two different bicycle trips. The students had to give a commentary of the bicycle trips. Without any sort of creativity or group work the assignment could have been completed in a period (or at the very least finished up for homework).

My colleague suggested that we spice up the assignment by having students create a performance that included a commentary on the bike trips. We left it open-ended on purpose to allow for a wide variety of submissions (live performance, videos, animated videos).

Generally speaking, the results were terrible and I reaffirmed the reasons why I tend not to give group work. I'm not blaming the failure on the students. I'm blaming myself for not being able to set things up effectively.

Here are some of the things that I noticed:

• We need to work on presentation skills. I assumed that they had these already.
• Most of  the class time I gave was wasted.
• Most of the groups had 1 or 2 people do all of the work, even though I offered suggestions on how to divide the work.
• Technology problems were great excuses for not getting things done on time.
• Rarely were all of the group members present, which became an excuse for not doing any work since the absent student always seemed to have the work.

All of these things made me realize that the time spent on the assignment didn't yield a good return on investment.

Here are some things that I've thought about for improving:

• I need to be explicit in addressing presentation skills. Talk about it on a daily or weekly basis, model good presentation skills, talk about when I do things wrong, etc.
• I have no idea how to address the issue of wasted class time.
• I also have no idea how to address the fact that some students didn't pull their weight. I had them complete self-evaluations and evaluations of their group members but that didn't seem to help.
• I need to lay some ground rules to let my class know that  they need to have a backup plan in place. The failure of technology does not excuse you from having to present.
• I need to teach them how to share files, etc. so that the absence on one student doesn't cripple the entire project. 

I may have jumped into the deep end a little too quickly. Perhaps I should have started with a smaller task that could have been completed in class, or even a small portion of the class, and had students working in pairs instead of larger groups.

Please help! What do you do to make group work effective?

Math Journals in Groups

I've never been a really big fan of using journals in math class. I think my dislike stems from the fact that the few times I've tried it I always had a large percentage of students saying "I can't do this" or "I know how to do the work but I can't explain it". As a result of the students being frustrated I too became frustrated and gave up.

I recently attended a differentiated instruction session where I was reminded about math journals. This time I wanted to make them work. I decided that I would train my students to be good journal writers. I figured that on past attempts I just gave up too early. I also decided that I would use journals not only to let me know what students understood but also to let students understand what they needed to work on. I know that this sounds obvious but in the past I would hand back journals, students would look at their mark and put them in their book never to look at (or think about) them again.

This time students were to write a summary of right angle trigonometry. They needed to tell me when it was used and how to use it. I collected the the journals and graded them immediately. I handed back the work to the weaker students and withheld the work of the stronger students. The stronger students became my subject experts. I paired strong students with weak students. The strong students had to explain the concepts to the weaker students. I then posted four problems to work on. The experts were to walk the weaker students through the first problem. The rest of the problems were worked on individually, but the students could check with each other to see how things were going. The next day I had all students redo the journal article.

How did it go? I think most students seemed to enjoy the experience. They didn't enjoy the journaling at first but seemed to enjoy the collaborative approach. When students rewrote their articles there was far less complaining. I even had some students ask if we could do more of this type of work.