Group Work that Works (Even in Large Classes!)

Ah, November. Crisp air, leaves turning colors and the looming dread of mediocre group papers and tedious group presentations through which we will soon suffer.  With finals on the horizon, we see rising levels of tension and resentment in our student groups, as good students assume more responsibility for their group’s final product, grinding their teeth as they feel forced to “carry” the slackers among them.

Next term, it doesn’t have to be this way.

There is a better design for group work that can stimulate the kind of engaged give-and-take discussion we want our students to have as they learn to use the intellectual tools of our disciplines.

We all want students to learn how to do our disciplines, but with exceptions like labs and field trips, the college classroom mostly prohibits us from involving students in real, raw disciplinary practice. What we can do in the classroom is give students practice making the kinds of decisions that we make in our disciplines—giving them what John Dewey calls “dramatic rehearsal” for real-world problem solving.  Our disciplines are, after all, defined by the kinds of questions they ask and how they go about answering those questions.

Bottom line:  effective group assignments do not require students to collectively author a paper or make a presentation. Writing and presenting are often individual tasks, and charging a group with these tasks, without special guidance on how to perform them, is to set up yourself (and your students) up for frustration and mediocrity.  On the contrary, effective group assignments simply give groups a set of data and require them to make a difficult decision, much like a courtroom jury is given a great deal of complex information and asked to render a “guilty or not guilty” decision.  In this format, student energy is focused on analyzing different pieces of evidence, weighing their merits against one another, and using the concepts from your discipline to argue toward a “best” conclusion together.

Instead of “group projects” think of these as “application activities” taking the form: “Given X, students must decide Y.” Of course, X and Y will vary based upon your discipline, topic and learning goal, but experience has provided a few basic principles for how these activities can best be carried out. Each of these principles starts with the letter S, so we have come to call these “Four S Activities.”

1. Significant Problem

Students should work on a problem, case, or question demonstrating a concept’s usefulness so they understand its impact. Instead of asking students to discuss some abstract set of conceptual distinctions, embed those distinctions within a set of concrete circumstances that would be likely to occur within your discipline. The idea here is to create a case study that grounds the experience in sets of details that would matter in your discipline.

2. Specific choice

Within the case, students should be required to use course concepts to make a decision (With which of the following three statements would Foucault most likely agree? Should the company buy, lease, or rent a fleet of trucks? Were Carnegie and Rockefeller “Robber Barons” or “Captains of Industry”? Which part of this bridge design is the most dangerous?). Groups can be required to generate short, written rationales for their choice, but groups must first be required to take a position.

3. Same problem

Students should all work on the same problem, case, or question so they will care about what other groups think about it and energetically engage each other around the course content.  If my group had one question and your group had another, I’ll have invested no energy in the details of your question and will probably tune out while you talk about it. However, if our groups addressed the same question but came to different conclusions, then I will want to hear what thinking led your group down a different path than the one mine took.

4. Simultaneous reporting

If possible, students should report choices at the same time so differences in group conclusions are not smoothed out by “answer drift” and can be explored. It can be a powerful instructional experience when a minority of students in the room actually come to a better answer than the rest, and when answers are reported sequentially, students in the minority can be strongly tempted to change their answers as their minority status becomes clearer.

Simultaneous reporting can take many forms:  from simple methods like pointing to one wall, the ceiling, or the other wall—to more sophisticated methods like having groups hold up cards indicating their choice (A,B,C,D), or even posting their answers and brief rationales on the classroom wall so they can “gallery walk” the thinking of other teams.  ”Clickers” are used by many teachers to achieve the simultaneous reporting effect.

Simultaneous Report

The best application activities not only stimulate intra-team discussion, they also stimulate inter-team discussion once the groups have reported their decisions. When all groups report their decisions, the teacher’s job is then to facilitate conversation among the groups to compare how and why they thought differently and came to different decisions. This is why simultaneous report is so important: when groups report simultaneously, differences between decisions are candidly revealed and can be explored by encouraging teams to explain the rationales for their choices to one another.

Some teachers use cases that clearly have a right answer and grade teams accordingly, some teachers do not grade choices but instead grade rationales given, and some teachers use ungraded application assignments when they feel the discussion itself is valuable enough to have in its own right.

These application activities are part of Team-Based Learning (TBL), an increasingly-popular  form of collaborative learning in higher education.  Team-Based Learning  interlocks and amplifies students’ social and intellectual experience of the classroom unlike any other form of group work.  To see it for yourself, you can watch a video with real footage of TBL in action here: http://www.utexas.edu/academic/ctl/teaching/tblvideo.php

Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching

from Chapter 12, Common Problems, in the book: On Course - A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching, by James M. Lang

Q: How do I handle rude student behavior in my classroom-talking, laughing, getting up and down during class?

"No experience of new faculty as teachers," writes Robert Boice, "is so dramatic and traumatizing as facing unruly, uninvolved students-especially in the large, introductory courses traditionally assigned to newcomers" (81). Undoubtedly true; equally troublesome, with the omnipresence of laptops and wireless-enabled classrooms, are students spending class time shopping for shoes online, rather than taking notes (see following question).

Two major points here. First, rude student behavior often comes about because of what's happening at the front of the classroom. If students are talking and reading the student newspaper during the lecture, sending e-mails, or IMing their friends, your lectures may be boring. If students are chit-chatting with each other during the discussion, you may not be asking interesting questions. A well-taught class is the best preventive measure you can take to counter what Boice calls as "student incivilities." His research on this issue suggests that newcomers face student incivilities at much higher rates than highly rated teachers with years of classroom experience (81-98). Fortunately for you, you are doing the work right now to become a highly rated teacher, and following the prescriptions of this book-and other preparatory work you do for your first semester-will be the best measure you can take against poor behavior.

However students, like the rest of the population, can be just rude idiots, so sometimes your best teaching efforts won't be enough to eliminate such behaviors. You won't know always know about students surfing the internet in class, but you will certainly know about noisy and rude students. When that happens, you can either shame such students by calling them on the behavior in front of their peers, or you can find ways to discuss their behavior with them in private. My non-confrontational personality, coupled with a dozen years of teaching and raising children, have convinced me that the latter route is the better one for correcting poor behavior. When identifiable students are acting uncivilly in your classroom (however you may define such activity), you can stop them after class and give them the standard lines you would expect to give-that such behavior makes it difficult for you and other students to concentrate, and so on. You can also ask them to come see you in your office, and discuss it there, if you think they require a more serious dressing down. A third method that I have used is to append a P.S. to one of my final comments on their papers, addressing the behavior and asking them to improve it or to come see me in my office. Calling them on the behavior privately like this has always worked for me. If you try this and it doesn't have the desired effect, check with your chair; seriously persistent and disruptive behavior should be observed by a senior faculty or administrator so that you won't suffer for it in your teaching evaluations (and they may be able to intervene with the students).

Q: Students have their laptops, cell phones, PDAs, and what-have-you on in my classroom, and whenever I step out into the seats I can see that half of them are shopping for shoes or downloading music or text messaging their friends. Some students have cell phones going off in class. What can I do about this?

A: This is probably the most annoying problem we will all face in the future, so best to consider it now and decide how you want to handle it. The solutions seem to me different for different sized-classes. In small classes, twenty or thirty or less, you need to have a strong physical presence in the classroom. You should be using interactive teaching methods in classes that size, of course, and such methods give you an opportunity to move out into the seats, work your way around the classroom, and let students know that at any given moment you will be standing behind them, seeing whatever they have on their desk or laptop. Do not isolate yourself in the front of the classroom; you command the entire space of the classroom, and you need to make yourself felt at every desk. You don't need to be in constant motion, of course; student awareness of your mobility will go a long way towards keeping them on task.

In larger lecture classrooms and auditoria, you can still do some of this, but the problems will be worse here. So you have two choices, and neither of them are ideal: learn to live with a certain amount of technological distraction, or ban the technologies that are disrupting your classroom. If you choose option one, it doesn't mean you should do nothing. At the very least, you should discuss the inappropriate use of technology in the classroom at the beginning of the semester, and perhaps even include on the syllabus a technology warning like the one cited by Michael Bujega in a Chronicle essay on this subject:

If your cellular phone is heard by the class you are responsible for completing one of two options: 1. Before the end of the class period you will sing a verse and chorus of any song of your choice or, 2. You will lead the next class period through a 10-minute discussion on a topic to be determined by the end of the class. (To the extent that there are multiple individuals in violation, duets will be accepted).

Whether you use humor in such a warning or not, including an admonition on the syllabus gives you an excuse to discuss the use of technology with students in the classroom, and to help the conscientious (but perhaps clueless) students see how to comport themselves more appropriately.

However, if you are teaching in a large wireless classroom, facing a sea of laptops, and you are convinced that the vast majority of the students are not listening to your scintillating words, then don't hesitate to ban laptops, either outright or for specific parts of the session. No student has a constitutional right to bring a laptop to class, so you have every right to forbid them (you might announce that you will make special provisions for students with disabilities, however). Don't feel bad about it; students have been taking notes with pencil and paper for many hundreds of years; it won't kill them. A less stringent option would be to allow or encourage laptops for specific activities in class-asking students to join you in reviewing a website or program you have scouted for them in advance, or working with them on a program or problem-but then asking them to close the laptops for the fifteen-minute lecture module you have planned for the end of the class, when you will be summarizing the main idea of the day.

Remember-you are in charge. As Bujega concludes at the end of his essay on inappropriate technology in the classroom, "despite digital distractions, large classes, decreased budgets, and fewer tenured colleagues, professors still are responsible for turning students on to learning. To do so, we just may have to turn off the technology."

Q: Students are not coming to class, or they come late. Do I leave those choices up to them, since they are adults, or do I become an enforcer and start each class with a daily quiz?

An article on poor attendance in college and university courses, which appeared in the spring of 2007 on insidehighered.com and provoked a massive outpouring of responses, offered a bleak picture of this issue. The article included the following statistics on attendance and tardiness patterns:
A 2005 survey of first-year undergraduate students by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles showed that while a majority of college students spend 11 or more hours in class per week, 33 percent reported skipping class and 63 percent said they come to class late "occasionally" or "frequently."A similar survey showed that the proportion of students who report coming late to class has jumped from 48 percent in 1966 to 61 percent in 2006 - evidence, one could argue, of a growing indifference to class in general.

I'm going to start sounding like a bit of a skipping CD here, but the first principle is to ensure that you are creating a classroom experience which students could not duplicate by copying someone else's lecture notes, or by listening to a recording of your lecture. Students, in other words, should play a role in the classroom. If you are giving students a role to play-through discussions, group work, in-class writing, problem-solving, and so on-then you have every right to say that the success of the course depends upon the presence of the students, and to require that presence. If you are standing in front of a podium and lecturing for fifty minutes, then I'm with the tardy and missing students on this one-why should they come to class, when they can get the same material more efficiently, and in the comfort of their dorm rooms, from other means?

As long as you are offering a class worth attending, which depends upon students for its success, then you should not hesitate to drop the hammer on late and absent students. Take whatever measures seem appropriate to you, from locking the door at the start of class to giving daily quizzes at the opening of class, from calling tardy students to the carpet as they walk in the door to penalizing students who miss more than three classes on their final grade. Consult the article on insidehighered.com for more ideas on combating this problem, and especially the responses that follow.

Q: I have trouble remembering the names of my own children; the prospect of remembering the names of several sets of twenty or thirty or forty undergraduates each year just seems impossible. Can I call on them as "red baseball cap" or "kid who plagiarized" or "crewcut" just to keep things simple for me?

A: I did know a teacher who managed this successfully, actually. At the beginning of the semester he hit upon some aspect of a student's appearance or mannerisms, gave them a nickname linked to it, and then referred to him or her in that manner in class. He pulled it off because he was eccentric and had a great sense of humor, and did not use offensive or embarassing nicknames (i.e., no one was nicknamed "baldie" or anything). The potential ways in which this practice could go bad are so numerous, though, that I really wouldn't recommend it.

Mary McKinney, a clinical psychologist who counsels academics on career issues, addressed this problem in an essay for the online academic news site insidehighered.com, and described there more than a dozen techniques for learning the names of students-her list is worth consulting, and is available online for free (see below for reference). The one that I like best, number twelve, may be the simplest. Every time a student asks a question or speaks in class, ask them for their name; repeat the name somehow in the answer-"Jane asks an important question here . . ."-and if that question or your response to it comes up in class again, associate it once again with her name: "You'll remember that Jane asked us this question last week . . ." The more times you repeat the name, the more likely you will be to remember it. This technique has the bonus benefit of affirming the importance of student contributions in your classroom, making visible to them how their ideas are woven into the fabric of the lectures and discussions. Classes of fifty or more obviously do not require you to learn everyone's name, but don't abandon names altogether. Learn any names you can, but don't fret about not having comprehensive coverage.

- University of Oregon, Teaching Effectiveness Program

How to Avoid Stage Fright

How can I avoid stage fright?

* Be well prepared! Have a comprehensive lesson plan with alternative back-up activities in case you finish early or some part of your plan does not go as you expected. Don't just wing it. This is not fair to your students. They have paid dearly for your time and expertise.

* If you are a GTF assisting a professor, present yourself as an experienced student rather than a teacher. You have majored in this discipline, attended the lectures, taken the tests, and written the papers. You are the primary conduit between the instructor and your students. You are there to facilitate their understanding of the material and to help answer their questions. You are not, in most cases, a content expert; you won't know the answer to every question your students ask. With your help, however, they can find those answers.

*Write your agenda for the class on the board to help you track what needs to be covered for the period. This way you are free to move around the room.

* Think in terms of communication rather than performance. Your students are not theater critics waiting for you to flub a line. They're probably more empathetic than judgmental, and if you take a moment here and there to refer to your notes, or back up and explain a previous point, you'll enhance the clarity of your presentation.

* The longer you talk, the more your nervousness will subside. Pay attention to the process: I'm better already. . . better yet. . . still better.

* Speak to one person in the classroom at a time. Make eye contact. Try smiling!

* Take it slow. Pause and give people time to catch up with you; they're working as hard as you are.

* Consider going through a practice run with a staff member in the Teaching Effectiveness Program. We can give you valuable feedback and suggestions on lesson plans, good icebreakers, lecturing techniques and overall course organization.

- University of Oregon, Teaching Effectiveness Program

The Important First Day: Starting Well

The Important First Day: Starting Well

By Delivee L. Wright, Teaching and Learning Center, University of Nebraska

The first day of class is a very important time for faculty to establish a tone for what will happen the rest of the term. It is appropriate that a teacher reflect on just what climate and first impression she/he would like to establish. This article offers some ideas about that all important day.

Reflecting on the first day of class, McKeachie (1986) suggests that "... meeting a group of strangers who will affect your well being, is at the same time exciting and anxiety producing for both students and teacher." Research on the first day of class by Knefelkamp showed there was a real desire on the part of both students and teachers for connectedness, but neither group realized the other shared that desire. If the participants on both sides don't understand how to develop their relationships, learning will be diminished. If you have experienced some anxiety about this meeting, planning some specific steps can not only reduce that feeling, but can get students to share in the sense of purpose you hold for the class.

Some faculty avoid the "first day anxiety" by handing out a syllabus, giving an assignment, and dismissing the class. This only postpones the inevitable. It also gives students a sense that class time is not too important. Most of all, it loses the opportunity to use the heightened excitement and anticipation that students bring that day; the chance to direct that excitement toward enthusiasm for the class.

What can you do to establish a positive beginning? How can you make sure student's attitudes toward you, the course, and the subject matter will support a constructive learning climate for the term? The following ideas have been gathered to stimulate your thoughts about these questions.

http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/dayone.htm