Group work advice for students

Some students may be experienced when it comes to collaborating within a group but others may be in need of some advice or guidance on what it takes to be an effective group member.  Much of the literature on implementing group work is focused on providing insights for instructors, but there are resources that are written for a student audience.  Here I hope to direct you to a few of these student-focused resources.

The Successful Strategies for Teams handbook
includes a discussion of team player styles in addition
to many other important topics for students to consider.

The first resource is a handbook, Successful Strategies for Teams, put together by Frances Kennedy and Linda Nilson at Clemson University.  The handbook, which is available online as a PDF, includes motivation for working in teams, stages of team development (forming, storming, norming, performing), skills, an overview of collaborative decision-making, and profiles of team player styles (contributor, collaborator, communicator, challenger).  A questionnaire about team player styles is also included alongside a discussion of each approach and what to do when a team is unbalanced, so to speak.  The handbook is full of information and insights; an instructor could easily select a particular topic to share with a class when group work is introduced initially and then refer students to other components gradually or when needed.

Guidelines offered by UNC at Chapel Hill

For those looking for something more compact, check out the set of guidelines offered by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for Faculty Excellence (see "Figure 1" at left or click here for full newsletter):

If you have a copy of McKeachie's Teaching Tips (2011) on your bookshelf, turn to the section on active learning for an even shorter list of suggestions for students.  There is a significant amount of overlap between this list and the one shown here to the left; in addition to suggestions about considering everyone's ideas and equal contributions from group members, McKeachie also recommends that the students reflect on the group's process and identifies next steps and also that the next meeting be planned before the current one concludes.

"Helpful Tips for Collaboration and Group Work," a web resource from The University of the Arts, occupies a middle ground between the extensive handbook from Clemson and the lists offered by UNC and McKeachie's Teaching Tips.  The webpage offers advice for getting started plus sections devoted to working efficiently and dealing with problems within a group; students may find a resource like this one particularly useful because they can easily access information from the different sections, which are detailed but brief, when and if they are needed.

Reference:

McKeachie, W. J., & Svinicki, M. (2011). McKeachie's teaching tips: Strategies, research, and theory for college and university teachers (13th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Clear objectives are a must for group work

Earlier this week, I stumbled across the tools and tips offered by The Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence at Penn State University while looking for insights on structuring effective group work.  At the time, I was on the hunt for info about roles for group members but took note of the other group-related advice, especially this document that addresses a series of commonly asked "How do I...?" questions.  The first question on the list is a particularly important one:

How do I decide which assignments/activities to make collaborative?

The authors point out that some assignments and activities are better suited for effective group work experiences than others.  Insights from IDEA Item #5 also reiterate this point with an argument that students will simply divide up, not discuss, the work when asked to address knowledge-type questions.  Instead, "the issue or problem should challenge the groups and demonstrate that there are no easy answers within the area of study."  Some follow up questions from The Schreyer Institute include:

What is the objective or goal of this assignment or activity? 

and...

How will that objective be furthered by asking students to work in groups? 

Perhaps the students will benefit from discussing possible ideas with one another, working together to arrive at a solution to a problem, or reflecting on information that was just presented - the exact purpose of the group approach will depend on the details of your lesson.  The reason(s) for working in a group must be clear to the students as this helps to establish a structure for positive interdependence within the group.  The purpose of the assignment or activity must be such that the team members need one another to achieve it!   The remaining follow up questions get at this important point:

Is this project complex and challenging enough that it would be impossible for an individual student to complete it alone?  

Will this project require students to synthesize their work in true collaboration, rather than just complete work separately and turn it in together at the end?

In addition to designing the assignment, activity, or project for collaboration and synthesis, this must also be clearly communicated to the students.  Nilson (2010) points out that unclear, imprecise group assignments create confusion for students about expectations and the intended purpose; as a result, this lack of clarity is a major reason that group work experiences fizzle.  Note that making an assignment longer, for example, is not necessarily a recommended way to transform it into one for a group.  Instead, working in groups is an opportunity for deeper (higher-level) thinking.  Maybe instead of recalling information, you want students to work together to apply or analyze information - a group may be better equipped than an individual to tackle a topic at this level.  If you are a fan of Bloom's Taxonomy, then you may find this wheel version with action verbs and student products helpful when designing and communicating clear assignment objectives (wheel created by Emily Hixton at Purdue University).

Reference:

Nilson, L.B. (2010). Teaching At Its Best. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Roles and structuring positive interdependence in groups

Positive interdependence is identified by Smith (1996) as a key element for successful group work.  What does positive interdependence look like?  There are a few things to be on the lookout for, but they all center on group members working together.  That is, students must working together to complete the task(s) and succeed as a team; if the tasks can be split up and completed individually, then this brings the very existence of the group/team into question.  Each member of the group must view the input of the other members as an ingredient for success in order for the group experience to be a collaborative one.

Forms of positive interdependence
A list of possible ways to structure positive interdependence is also provided by Smith (1996):

• group product-goal interdependence (e.g., one answer must be agreed upon by the group);
• learning goal interdependence (e.g., each member must be able to explain the group's answer);
• role interdependence (each member must fulfill responsibilities of an assigned role);
• reward interdependence (shared reward);
• resource interdependence (shared resources); 
• task interdependence (division of labor).

(See this page from the Wisconsin Center for Education Research for expanded descriptions of each form of positive interdependence listed above.)  A number of these are self-explanatory, but the others warrant additional discussion.  Here I will focus on role interdependence with the intention of returning to others in later posts.

Roles for group members

If you are looking around for a list of possible roles, you'll quickly notice that the exact contents of the list will depend on the source; however, lists' suggestions and examples tend to overlap.  I am, for example, currently looking at this list of roles for projects from a Penn State resource archive, this list of possible roles from the Wisconsin Center for Education Research site, and ideas for student roles from the Starting Point project (just three resources of the many out there), and "facilitator" and "recorder" are both common suggestions from all three sources while "skeptic" is offered on the Penn State site as a role for group projects with a notable amount of brainstorming involved.  This last detail points to the fact that roles should align with what is being asked of the groups.  Are the groups completing a semester-long project, or are they participating in a group discussion that is recurring each week?  For the latter, Starting Point suggests "elaborator" - someone who establishes connections between the current discussion and previous topics or overall theme - as a possible role, but this may not be something that is needed (or at least a priority) for a semester-long project.

What about rotating roles?  Again, this is likely to depend on what the groups are focused on achieving.  For shorter/less in-depth group assignments that are recurring throughout the term, having the group members rotate through the roles provides each individual with a chance try different roles - ones that are comfortable and others that are not-so-comfortable.  Of course, for an ongoing project, switching roles may interrupt the group's progress and might not be desirable.

Should the students or the instructor decide the roles?  The recommendation from the Wisconsin Center for Education Research is to allow students with group work experience the opportunity to select/decide roles (when time allows) but that it may be best for the instructor to assign roles if students are new to or not as comfortable with working in groups.  So far, this is the one recommendation I have come across for who decides the roles; I will be sure to update with others if and when they are located.

The group-focused series will continue later this week with more on key ingredients for building effective groups and/or group work experiences.  Identifying clear objectives - the importance of and the instructor's role - is a likely candidate for the next post.

Reference:

Smith, K. A. (1996). Cooperative learning: Making “groupwork” work. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 1996(67), 71–82.

Homogeneous vs. heterogeneous group formation

A few weeks ago, a colleague shared an interesting insight from her experiments with forming student groups: when students are grouped together by similar skill sets, some students who haven't previously demonstrated leadership skills eventually emerge as leaders for their respective teams.  She went on to explain that the non-leaders emerging as group leaders is a contrasting result to the occasions when groups were formed with an emphasis on mixing skill sets; in the case of these heterogeneous groups, the leadership role is most often assumed by a student who has previously demonstrated leadership skills.

Leadership can be important for a team that will be intact for longer-term assignments, including major projects.  This need for a leader can provide an opportunity for someone new to rise to the challenge when a team is composed of "social loafers," to borrow a phrase from a recent Faculty Focus article.  For a more heterogeneous team that includes social loafers and proven leaders, it is not overly surprising when social loafers continue to sit back while other group members take the lead.  Might this be an argument for forming homogeneous teams from time to time?

Of course, "homogeneous" can refer to a variety of characteristics.  Forming groups based on similar opinions can yield different results compared to groups based on similar skill sets.  One approach isn't necessarily better than the other; as stated in an earlier post, the best way to form groups largely depends on what the groups are being asked to accomplish.  Barkley, Cross, and Major (2005) point out that grouping students by skill level may be particularly beneficial in language and math courses, for example; the similarities are likely to foster communication among group members since they share a common starting point.

There are potential drawbacks to homogeneous groups, and these downsides are neatly packaged into arguments in favor of forming groups that are heterogeneous.  Groups that include students with a range of skills, for example, may be better prepared for a variety of tasks, and heterogeneous groups are likely to expose its members to a greater variety of backgrounds and/or experiences vs. homogeneous groups (Barkley, Cross, & Major, 2005, p. 45).  Sometimes heterogeneity can lead to disagreements among group members if they are approaching an issue or problem in different ways (which is not necessarily bad depending on the intended outcome!), and/or it may generate some unintended consequences if students are isolated from others with similar backgrounds (gender, academic ability, etc.) that may provide helpful support.  Note that if these potential downsides of heterogeneous groups seem to create too many hurdles, it may be worth (re)considering homogeneous groups based on the characteristic that is most important to clump together.

For instructors using groups for shorter-term, lower-stakes opportunities, switching back and forth between homogeneous and heterogeneous groups is always an option too!  For long-term groups focused on higher-stakes assignments, keeping groups intact for as long as possible is the general recommendation since it fosters trust between members.

Reference:

Barkley, E. F., Cross, K. P., & Major, C. H. (2005). Collaborative learning techniques: A handbook for college teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Self-selection or random assignment as options for short-term groups

My last post focused on a strategic way of forming student teams based on the Team-Based Learning Collaborative's guidelines, an approach that aims to construct teams that work well for longer-term, high-stakes tasks and assignments.  What about the more spontaneous, less-planning-involved options?  There are times when an instructor wants to use a quick group activity to break up a lecture, for example, and taking the time to identify and prioritize criteria for sorting students just isn't feasible or even needed.

Students self-selecting groups or the instructor randomly assigning students to groups are suitable approaches when the groups will only be intact for a short period of time and/or for low-stakes tasks.  Having a go-to method for randomly assigning students is often useful, and there are a number of options that can be executed quickly, e.g., having students count off by the number of desired teams.  For a creative twist on randomly assigning students to teams, check out this Geography-based approach used by Dr. Sarah Bednarz at Texas A&M:

"For short term groups (one or two classes), I frequently use random assignment, e.g., as students enter class they are given a card with an identifier such as the continents, islands, capital cities (geography examples in my case). Then, when it is time to form the groups, I can simply ask all the Antarcticas to move to the back of the room; all the South Americas to the front, etc."

This example of group formation is one of several offered by the Faculty Teaching and Learning Portal at Texas A&M University; see more examples and an expanded discussion of team formation here.  A Faculty Focus newsletter from last summer, "Better Group Work Experiences Begin with How the Groups Are Formed," highlights a few more quick ways to randomly assign students to groups (e.g., birthdays, last digit of cell phone number) as part of a comparison of random assignment, student-formed, and instructor-formed groups.

What about the students selecting their own groups?  The research on this approach seems to be mixed, at best.  For example, both van der Laan Smith and Spindle (2007) and Hilton and Phillips (2010) document the benefits to students when students are allowed to self-select groups (higher grades for high-achieving students and higher quality work reported by students, respectively) for accounting courses; however, the aforementioned Faculty Focus newsletter points out that trade-offs do exist.  Students working within self-selected groups must grapple with the challenge of transitioning from social interactions to completing tasks and are not necessarily expanding their experiences of working with individuals they do not know.  The observation from Hilton and Phillips (2010) that students are more likely to get to work immediately when working together with others that they already know may be advantage enough to overlook these potential downsides when dealing with short-term, low-stakes group situations.

References:

Hilton, S., & Phillips, F. (2010). Instructor-assigned and student-selected groups: A view from inside. Issues In Accounting Education, 25(1), 15-33.

van der Laan Smith, J., & Spindle, R. (2007). The impact of group formation in a cooperative learning environment. Journal of Accounting Education, 25(4), 153-167.

A process for sorting students into diverse teams

I have recently agreed to teach a class during the Fall 2014 semester, so I am listening more closely than ever to conversations related to forming students into teams as I anticipate teaching in one of the active learning classrooms.  Don't get me wrong, I've used group work in classes many times before, but there is something about the active learning room being focused on students working in groups that has me thinking more carefully about group formation.  What is the best way to organize students into teams?  In the past, I've tried a variety of approaches, including organizing students by major/program and gender (with the hopes of a somewhat even distribution), allowing students to choose their own, and enlisting our course management system to randomly assign students to groups.  Other instructors on campus have students join teams based on availability for meetings, skills/strengths that align with group roles, grades in prerequisite courses - the list goes on and on.  As with most other things, the best option for organizing students into teams seems to largely depend on the objective.  

Given that there are options aplenty, one group formation approach at a time will be highlighted here in order to allow room for some discussion of the when and why aspects.  Today's focus is on the approach recommended by the Team-Based Learning Collaborative, which aims to provide all teams with equal chances at success.  The general advice from the Collaborative (see response to forming teams FAQ here) points to three recommendations:

1. distribute assets and liabilities ("background factors that are likely to make a difference in students' performance in this class") as evenly as possible across groups, 
2. be sure that teams do not include pre-existing subgroups that may hinder the team's ability to work together as a whole (e.g., three roommates paired with two other students who do not know each other), and 
3. teams are formed using a process that is transparent to the students.

Luckily, the Collaborative's website also offers Michael Sweet's example of how to quickly form student teams according to these guidelines (see "Forming Fair Groups Quickly" halfway down the page).  In this example, the formation of the teams actually takes place in the classroom; however, the instructor has a couple of key decisions to make ahead of time.  The "sorting criteria" - that is, the characteristics that should be evenly distributed across the student teams - must be determined and prioritized in advance.  What strengths ("assets") should be distributed across teams?  What challenges ("liabilities") are best to spread out?  If students who have completed an advanced statistics course, for example, are likely to be at an advantage in the course, then identifying this as a sorting criterion and ensuring those students are evenly dispersed is important.  Likewise, if students without experience collecting data are going to be at somewhat of a disadvantage, then that experience/lack of experience should be evenly distributed as well.  Once these criteria have been identified and prioritized, then the sorting of the students and counting off into teams can commence.  This approach is likely to work best for instructors that are interested in forming (strategically) diverse teams that have an element of randomness to them so that each team has a pretty even chance at succeeding on the project or in the course.

An example 'glog' & its potential for a group project

Last week I highlighted "glogs" as a web-based option for creating digital research posters, and I have put the finishing touches on an example glog to pair with this discussion of how this could be used as a group project - one that would be especially well-suited for the active learning classrooms on the UWEC campus.

Here is a link to the glog; a screen shot is shown below for those who want to take a quick glance:

What went into glog creation?
It is worth pointing out that I found myself wishing for at least a couple of collaborators while putting together the glog over the past week!  Even though working within a group presents its own challenges, I could have used a few more brains and sets of eyes for a few of the activities that went into the glog creation, including:

• Identifying an appropriate timeline (or glimpse of a timeline, really) for the event;
• Locating coordinating images and screening video clips;
• Gleaning important background information from a variety of reports, including two lengthy reports;
• Summarizing aforementioned background information into concise statements;
• Locating appropriate data to complement the words and visuals;
• Arranging and rearranging the glog components to ensure that all of the important items would fit;
• Editing the text items to highlight certain points while maintaining some sense of consistency.

I spent approximately 6-8 hours on this glog, which is more than I initially expected since the topic is one that has routinely been a focus of discussion in my intro-level economics courses over the past few years.  In other words, I have already examined at the data, read several reports, and trolled YouTube for helpful videos - I can only imagine how long it might take someone who is new to the topic!

Ideas for a coordinating class project

Here's what I had in mind when I selected the topic for this example glog: Zimbabwe's recent episode is one of a long list of hyperinflation episodes that have occurred across time and space, so one approach would be for each group to focus on a different hyperinflation episode for their glog.  A larger objective for the class would then be to identify the basic underlying pattern for each of the hyperinflation episodes.  In other words, what are the "ingredients" of hyperinflation, so to speak, and how does this information aid our understanding of why these episodes occur?   Addressing these important questions could be a part of a discussion or a reflection paper - to be completed as a group or as individuals - that follows a digital poster-sharing session in class in which students can move around the room to ask each group questions about their particular hyperinflation episode (perhaps with pairs of team members taking turns manning their own digital poster to share and answer questions).

Options for individual accountability

Collaboration does not happen automatically (see last post about collaborative learning for more on this).  There are a number of options available to increase the chances of effective collaboration with this type of project, and there should be some form of individual accountability in order to ensure that team members are working together and sharing the workload.  One possibility is to divide up the project's tasks among the members of the group (see example list above) and ask for each component to be submitted individually - ideally, at the point in the project that it is needed - as well as for it to be incorporated into the final product.  Another option would be to require each student to complete a set of tasks individually (e.g., extract three important points from a given report, locate two images that represent the event, and identify one YouTube video that would be a good source of related information) and then have the groups meet to sort through the available options, refine, and locate additional materials, if needed.  The important step here would be for each member of the group to be held accountable for his or her share of the work, which helps to minimize the possibility of freeloaders and reduce the fear that the lack of effort by one or more group members will have a negative impact on the grades of those who do their share.

Group projects do not necessarily translate into saving time

Students should be asked to collaborate with one another when collaboration is valuable.  Groups often provide opportunities for students to capitalize on strengths and specialize; however, discussion and decision making takes time.  Horton (2012) identifies allocating sufficient time for teams to work effectively as an important aspect of designing coordinating activities: "Typically team activities take three to ten times as long as an analogous solo activity" (p.498).  This serves a reminder to be thoughtful when offering opportunities for collaborative learning.

References:
Horton, W. (2012). E-learning by design (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.

Collaborative learning as a form of active learning

The active learning classrooms have reinvigorated the ongoing discussion about students working in groups.  How can/should groups be formed?  What leads to students working together effectively?  How can collaboration be encouraged?  One post alone cannot offer sufficient answers to all of these questions, so consider this the start of a longer, always-in-progress, response.

According to Weimer (2002), "...like every other instructional method, good group learning experiences do not happen automatically" (p.88).  Planning is needed.  I firmly believe that students collaborating with one another has great potential, but group members working together effectively has been a work-in-progress for me for years.  At one point, I decided to stop guessing and to start asking students, informally, what it was about group work that created barriers to effective collaboration, and most student feedback I have received thus far seems to converge on a few points:

• Meeting with group members outside of scheduled class time is often a challenge.
• Fear that lack of effort/poor quality work by one or more group members will negatively impact the grade.
• The work is sometimes - or frequently - unevenly distributed across group members.

There is no doubt that points two and three are intertwined, and the first point might sometimes play a supporting role there too. While its contents are not overly surprising, the list does offer some good news.  If students perceive these sorts of items to be barriers, then addressing one or more of these concerns may help to increase the level and/or quality of student collaboration.

Also worth pointing out is the fact that the active learning classrooms have the potential to help out here.  The students are, by default, organized into pods of up to six students in the active learning rooms, and each pod is equipped with a computer and large widescreen monitor for activities that ask the groups to refer to artifacts (e.g., documents, images, web resources) and/or produce something (e.g., problem solving steps, description, blog post, evidence that supports a claim).  Allocating class time for the group to plan, discuss, and accomplish tasks will help to eliminate or reduce the need for students to meet with group members outside of class.  The physical setup of an active learning room lends itself better to students collaborating with another vs. the layout of a traditional lecture hall or a classroom with fixed tables.

A handful of our active learning instructors teach hybrid (blended) classes with some scheduled class meetings replaced with online activities and/or content, and this presents a second option for alleviating the first concern: (1) group members are, technically speaking, available, and (2) the active learning classroom is open for students to meet in their groups during those scheduled class times that have been replaced with online material.  Groups wouldn't be required to meet in the classroom during that time, but they also wouldn't be able to say that no one could meet outside of class either.

So what can be done to address the concerns over grades and the uneven distribution of work?  Individual accountability is the suggestion from both Kagan (1995) and Weimer (2002).  Both reiterate the important fact that students' course grades are intended to reflect individual progress towards meeting the course objectives.  There are various ways to allow for individual accountability.  For one, each group member can be asked to submit individual materials that will then provide a foundation for the group's assignment - either each person submits an individual attempt of an identical task or the tasks that make up the larger group assignment are divided up across group members and each individual must submit the assigned component (in addition to the group submitting the end product).  As long as the individual's work is incorporated into the grade, then this will help to minimize the impact of any free loaders.

Even Horton (2012), in E-Learning by Design, highlights the need to fairly evaluate individuals in team learning environments: "Decide how to determine whether the team accomplished its objective and how much each member contributed" (p.499).  I have to admit that I wasn't expecting a lengthy discussion of team learning in a text focused on e-learning, but it is great when best practices translate across modes of instruction!

References:

Horton, W. (2012). E-learning by design (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.

Kagan, S. (1995). Group grades miss the mark. Cooperative Learning and College Teaching, 6(1), 6-8.

Weimer, M. (2002). Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice. San Francisco, CA:      Jossey-Bass.