How can you make it work?

Frustrated teachers sometimes blame their students for unsuccessful group work, however quite often it’s the teacher’s fault. Unless we value student centred learning and recognise that unanticipated outcomes may be just as significant for student learning as those we plan for, it might be better not to do it!

Naturally, for all the reasons stated earlier, I would recommend that you definitely try it out. Keeping the following suggestions in mind should help you get your students working effectively:

• Explain the learning method and its rationale, especially if unfamiliar. It isn’t unfamiliar of course; we have all experienced small group learning since primary school. Nevertheless, we should anticipate that students coming to higher education and paying the costs of their studies may expect to be ‘taught’ and may complain if they aren’t.
• Brief the students carefully. They must understand what they are supposed to do and how they are supposed to do it.
• Allow enough time for the task(s) to be completed and for debriefing. Feedback is the most important part of the task – some of the literature suggests it should last for half as long as the activity itself. If feedback is rushed or unfinished, the activity will tail off and participants may feel they’ve learned nothing from it. One way of finishing off is to ask each participant what they think they have learned from the exercise, about the topic, about working in a group, etc. Debriefing can take place in a plenary group, or in smaller groups which then feed their insights back into the plenary.
• Know something about group dynamics. This is how groups develop and how participants behave in groups. You need to be able to recognise cues that indicate various levels of development and to identify obstacles which stop groups working well. On how groups grow, see Tuckman (1965). Belbin (amongst others) has identified a number of roles which need to be performed if a team is to work effectively – see the Belbin team roles website for descriptions.
• Set, or allow the group to set, ground rules. Newly formed working groups should establish a set of ground rules to facilitate co-operation, for example procedures for setting deadlines, keeping a record of meetings, dealing with non-attenders, ensuring confidentiality.
• Be prepared to take on the role of tutor-facilitator. Successful facilitation involves:
  1. Being able to plan effective group learning activities, to brief groups clearly and unambiguously on what is expected, and to have a repertoire of responses when things go wrong, for example how to deal with poor or irrelevant group outputs.
  2. Being ready to hand over responsibility and let go.
  3. Developing skills of observation so you know when (and when not) to intervene.
  4. Building relationships of trust. This is about encouraging a safe, secure, risk free environment to develop. Individuals are most likely to reach their full potential in an empathic and accepting environment (Rogers 1961).
  5. Teaching groups how to give and receive feedback. These rules are probably automatic to us, but students may not be aware of them. For a list, see Jaques & Salmon (2007: 76-7).
• Provide a suitable physical environment. So far as possible ensure an arrangement of furniture that facilitates group communication and allows participants to move around freely. Damasio notes that the body and the brain are an “indissociable organism” – in other words, to understand mental processes you have to consider the context in which they are operating, such as how the ‘organism’ interacts with the physical (and social) environment (light, room temperature, comfort, freedom to move around, etc).

Last Modified: 2 August 2010