Implementing Group Work in the Classroom

To Group or Not To Group?

Group work can be an effective method to motivate students, encourage active learning, and develop key critical-thinking, communication, and decision-making skills. But without careful planning and facilitation, group work can frustrate students and instructors and feel like a waste of time. Use these suggestions to help implement group work successfully in your classroom.

In order for students to be successful during group work students need:

• Tasks that cause students to talk with one another
• Questions or problems that cause students to cooperate as they formulate, share and or compare ideas
• A mix of individual and group accountability

 Students are working in a group using popsicle sticks to represent 10’s in math. Students discussed how they represented the given number, if they were correct or incorrect, whether they disagreed or agreed with each other how they could potentially change their representation. I was able to see through the collaborative working methods,  students support each other, push each other's thinking and effectively question each other

Students are working together to understand place value. They are engaging in discussion about how to correctly represent the number in the chart, are listening to each other's thoughts and ideas and are giving constructive feedback when necessary. 

Because I was interested to look more deeply into how students remain engaged in the classroom, I chose to observe my students during “cooperative learning time.” This was a special time when students were allowed to work freely with their classmates and work through their misunderstandings and understandings of the content they had been taught. Through the course of my research, I identified collaborative working times as valuable occasions for me to learn about how students’ work together and the ways that the students learn from this approach.

A major finding of my research was that students need more opportunities to communicate or collaborate with peers. Even when a given curriculum doesn’t explicitly incorporate group work, kids still make evident the need for this type of interaction. Collaborative work/peer communication, it seems, is an intricate part of child development. Research states, through discussion students are building team-building spirit and more supportive relationships; greater psychological well-being, social competence, communication skills productivity and self-esteem; and higher achievement in terms of enhanced learning outcomes

Throughout the course of my research, I realized time and time again incorporating group work and allowing students to work together is very important. The concept of students working in groups promotes a setting where collaboration and cooperation are valued and produce better results, teaching the students valuable life-long skills that are important to their professional lives.