Group Work Update

Introduction:

So it’s half way through the year and once again, I am thinking pretty deeply about group work and how to teach and sustain it in my classroom. From September until December, I had students sit in pairs. I launched roles for the pairs and the question-asking protocol (see my previous entry) in September. However, I did not continue to reinforce either of those, so they fell out of use. Coming into January, I decided that I wanted to re-launch group work. I moved my desks into groups of four and reintroduced my question protocol. I changed the partner roles into group roles, adapting language and ideas from here. I structured the first two weeks of class in January to explicitly teach and build these routines. Since then, I have been trying to do at least one lesson a week where I plan a task and a structure that relies on the group roles and (hopefully) teaches the students more explicitly about how to use them.

Here are the group roles that I am using. Facilitator is split between two people if there are four in a group and is done by one person if there are three in a group.

NAVIGATOR — focus on GROUP INTENTION

Keep the group pointed in the direction of reaching a shared understanding:

•   read instructions aloud

•   enforce norms

•   resolve conflicts, find compromises

•   organize production of high-quality group deliverables to turn in

FACILITATORS — focus on GROUP PROCESS

Keep the process of collaboration running smoothly:

Person A:

•   watch progress & the time

•   make sure the group meets its deadline

•   lead the process of filling out the group self-assessment questionnaire to turn in

Person B (if your group has only 3 people, Person A should also do these roles):

•   get the work off to a fast start

•   make sure everyone participates (turn-taking)

•   make sure everybody has good written record of work

RESOURCE MANAGER — focus on GROUP RESOURCES

Get what your group needs:

•   get & return all needed supplies

•   organize the group to ask a group question of the teacher (make sure that anyone in the group can state the shared question)

•   call the teacher over for group questions

•   organize clean-up

(As a side note, when I launch group roles next year, I would like to have the group roles cards also have sentence frames for each role.)

I am also currently participating in a 5-session workshop where I am thinking about group work in my classroom as well as group work in others teachers’ classrooms. For this group, I had to present a success (using this protocol) and I chose to talk about my introductory lesson for group roles. I somewhat unexpectedly found this a really useful exercise. I have a tendency to focus on the challenges I am having and figuring out how to change or fix them. Not only did focusing on a success make me feel more confident about my teaching, presenting it and hearing responses from other teachers helped me identify what made this lesson so successful. This will make me a better teacher because now I know what I should keep doing.

I started with some of the context above, along with some pictures of my classroom set-up and overall norms.

Structure of the lesson:

I started this part of class with a brief re-introduction to the idea that we would work on some problems that really lend themselves to group work. For these problems, we would use group roles. Each person had a role taped to their table and spent a couple of minutes doing some individual writing about what their role was. We then had a brief discussion about why group roles might be helpful and what might be challenging about them. The pros of group roles that the students talked about were that everyone has something to do and it holds everyone accountable. They identified the challenges that some people might not do their role or that some people might accidentally or purposely do someone else’s role.

Then, I launched the problem to the whole class. This was my version of Nathan Kraft’s version of the oreo problem. I gave some initial information during the launch (I eat only the filling in oreos, my sister eats only the cookies. We had a box of double-stuff oreos and wanted to know who was getting more calories). In the spirit of Ilana Horn’s Strength in Numbers, I handed each table a task card with the additional information they needed, the questions, the final product details, and how they were being assessed.

Task card:

The Oreo Problem!
The questions - How many calories are in one cookie? - How many calories are in one single filling? - If Ms. Hansen eats the filling from a Double Stuf oreo and her sister Emy eats the two cookies, who ate more calories?	The product The table will create a poster that has… - a diagram to represent the problem information - a system of equations where both variables are defined - the work done to solve the problem - answers to all 3 questions
Assessment Your grade will be based on… - group work grade based on norms and table roles - mathematics on the poster - individuals will describe their contribution to the group work
The information
One serving: Three Oreo Cookies 160 calories		One serving: Two Double Stuf Oreo Cookies 140 calories

As they started the problem, I put up a "participation quiz" on the board where I wrote down +’s and –‘s for the group. 

This is also from Strength in Numbers and I have used participation quizzes periodically and pretty successfully throughout the fall. Once they got the task card, groups had about forty minutes to work on the problem and create a rough draft of the final product.  Finally, I had them go back to their individual writing and reflect on their contribution to the group and how they had done with the group roles.

Here are some of the rough drafts that were produced by the groups:

  

And here are some of the individual writing that students did before and after the group work time:

Reflection

Here is what I identified that made this a successful class period:

• I had done participation quizzes in the past and they have been a really good tool for getting groups back on task—in this lesson I felt like the participation quiz was extraneous. Students didn’t need it as a reminder to do what they needed to do. This meant I was able to confer with groups more.
• All students were participating. I have one student who rarely produces any work. The facilitator at his table repeatedly re-engaged him.
• There was a group of 3 who really had trouble listening to each other. Their facilitator was not able to smooth things out between them. I went over, had each of them write what they were thinking individually for about 5 minutes. Then, I stood there while they explained to each other their thoughts. They ended up going with the ideas of someone who has very little social capital but had a great math idea.
• Two of the students who are the most distracted and struggle the most were absent. I am still trying to figure out the best way to engage them in group work.
• With prompting, the resource manager made sure that the group had discussed any questions before asking me and that everyone knew what the question was.

Here are the successful elements that were identified by the other teachers in my workshop:

• The participation quiz was a strong visual reminder to students on how they were contributing.
• Reflective writing at the beginning and the end allowed students to think about their role and then reflect on how they contributed. This led to more individual accountability.
• Students relied on each other as resources, not just the teacher.
• This lesson was part of a sequence that built up group work (even thinking as far back as the fall) rather than throwing everything at the students at once.

The teachers in my workshop also asked me some very useful questions:

1. Was it the plan all along to start small and build up with group work?
   Yes. This has been the plan since the summer. Both this fall and in January I planned out how and what order I was going to introduce different elements of group work.
2.  Did they have any individual time to work on the math task?
   No, they did not have any individual time to work on the math task before talking about it with ttheir groups. Given the nature of having the navigator read the instructions, I am finding it awkward to then have them do individual work time and then have them go back in the group. Based on this question, the next group work activity I did, I gave an agenda to groups and had the facilitator monitor a couple minutes of private think time for everyone in the group.
3.  Did they actually do the group roles? Was it strict about who did what role?
   In this class they did some of the group role things (navigator reading aloud, resource manager organizing the questions, facilitator watching the time and making sure that everyone had a copy of the work). As they were going, I occasionally gave directions to a specific role. For instance, when I gave time checks, I specifically called out the facilitators and told them to make sure that their group was on track. I was also strict about people doing their own role. Eventually, I would be fine with more fluidity of the roles as long as they are all getting them done. But while the kids are still being introduced, I think it is important to keep the roles distinct in order for everyone to be held accountable. This question and discussion prompted me to think about how I could structure tasks to teach more deeply into the roles. At this point, I am trying to do at least one a week where one of the main objectives is for students take ownership over their roles and continue to increase the effectiveness of group work.

Joyful Learning - Vignette 1

I am currently part of a group of teachers who are investigating joyful learning. The essential questions of our group are as follows:

• What does the “pursuit of joyful learning” mean to us-- as learners and as educators? Why is it important?
• What does it mean to teach with “joy” in mind? (students owning, driving and expressing joys of learning?)
• What does joy sound like and look like? 

As part of our investigation, we have done some writing about experiences of joy in our own learning. Here is my response to the prompt: 

What is one salient memory or example (recently or as far back as childhood) where you were both driven and excited about learning something hard? 

To give some context, this learning experience took place during the math content methods class I took as a preservice teacher. I was student teaching Monday through Thursday and then we met for three hours on Thursday evening.

It was Thursday afternoon after a full week of teaching and we were sitting in content methods class. Our teachers had realized early in the year that what gave us energy in this class was doing math. And so like most weeks, we started class with a math problem that was related to whatever we were learning about that day.

We were focusing on geometry that week and they selected the following math problem:

You have a cake that is a rectangular prism with a square base. It is frosted on the top and each of the four sides. You want to split the cake into seven equal sections, where each section has the same amount of frosting and the same volume of cake.

We started working individually, each on our own separate piece of chart paper. On the paper, we were documenting our thinking, rather than trying to make a presentable product. This was a habit that we had gotten into over the course of the year and one that we wanted our students to do as well. The problem, though fairly straightforward in its set-up, was hard. The challenge and interest came from the corners and the frosting on the sides of the cake. Although I don’t remember exactly what I did during that initial private think time, I likely chose dimensions for the cake and calculated the volume as well as the surface area of the frosting. I probably thought about a circle and how much simpler (and more boring) the problem would be if it were a circular cake.

After some time to grapple with the problem on our own, we started working in partners. Again, I don’t remember the specific details of what my partner or I said or did. But based on how partner work generally went in that class, I would guess that we both shared what we had worked on so far, and asked questions of each other in order to both understand and probe each others’ thinking. This then gave each of us a direction to keep working or something new to try. We probably then continued to work individually, but would periodically check in, because sharing our ideas helped us thinking more clearly and creatively. Our teachers watched what we were doing. They also asked us questions so that they could understand. In talking with them, it pushed our thinking, just like talking to our partners. They, however, did not indicate how they had solved the problem, or if we were on the “right track.” We were the ones who were doing the heavy lifting of thinking.

There are particulars that I do remember from this day, though, that made it stand out from the other content methods classes. This is the only problem from the whole year that I did not come up with a solution for during class. Our teachers had us share out specific parts of our strategies to the rest of the class. One of my classmates, who taught under the same mentor teacher as me, had figured out a solution. I remember her being so proud and borderline smug (we all knew each other well enough at this point that it was allowed to be borderline smug) that she had come to a solution. I remember being annoyed and jealous that I hadn’t been able to figure out a reasonable solution in the time that we were given.

The feelings that we had were not destructive or harmful to the learning or the relationship we had with each other, though. They were part of friendly competition that rested on the solid foundation that we had set up as a community. I trusted everyone in that room to know that I was trying my best and that I did have interesting/useful ideas about math and teaching. I know that I believed that of everyone else in the room. I also knew that they were there to support me no matter what. Throughout the year, they had seen me at my lowest points, just as I had seen them. In those times, they had helped me figure out how to pick myself back up and keep going. So we could have a little friendly competition and boasting because of that.

The last thing that I remember clearly about that problem and that day was that even though one person had figured out a solution, none of us were satisfied at the end. The solution was inelegant. It brute-forced a way for everyone to get the same amount of cake and the same amount of frosting. We were all convinced that there was a more elegant way to split that cake into 7 equal pieces. Despite having a solution, we wanted to keep working on the problem in order to find a better one.

Looking back at what I remember from this class, there are so many elements that made us both driven and excited to work on this problem. Here are the elements that I notice that I want to work towards in order to foster joy in learning mathematics in my own classroom:

1. Our teachers intentionally structured class to start with something they knew was engaging and gave us energy.
2. The problem we were looking at was simple to understand but challenging to solve.
3. We all had some time to start the problem on our own.
4. We weren’t trying to make a final product as we were solving. The documentation we did was a record of our thinking.
5. My partner and I both found it useful to talk to each other about our work because explaining our own work and hearing someone else’s ideas pushed our thinking on the problem.
6. We had the freedom and the self-regulation skills to move back and forth between individual thinking and discussing our work with partner.
7. We, the students, did the majority of the thinking. Our teachers supported us, but I still have no idea how they solved the problem, or if they knew a more elegant solution than anything we came up with.
8. I was interested in what the other groups had tried. This was facilitated by what our teachers had us share with the whole group, but was primarily because everyone shared a different idea that as a class pushed us closer to a solution.
9. We all trusted and respected each other. We had built relationships where every single person was valuable to the group.
10. The competition that we felt with each other pushed us all to do our best.
11. Despite having found an answer, we still wanted to work on the problem. We valued other parts of the solving process (elegance, succinctness, being able to articulate ideas) more than having a solution.