Alanna Petrie – English Department

Last year, as a probationer teacher, I often encountered the difficulty of making group work effective. When planning group activities I had imagined a class full of interrogative youngsters working together to achieve their lesson aim. This was not quite the reality. The problems I encountered were that the work was being done by only one or two of the group while the others sat back or, that pupils would quickly seize the opportunity to socialise rather than learn.

After trying a variety of group work strategies, I was introduced to co-operative learning.

The aim of co-operative learning is to ensure that when pupils are working in groups they are all focused on achieving their learning goal. It works because the strategies rely on every member of the group fulfilling their role to ensure the success of the team. Not only are these strategies a good way of making lessons active and enjoyable but they also help to develop two of the four capacities: successful learners and effective contributors.

There are a number of co-operative strategies that I have used with my classes to make group work meaningful. The following are a few examples.

Group roles

This is a strategy that most teachers will have used. The idea is to give each group member a particular role. I used this to help pupils practise for a solo talk assessment. Pupils were arranged into groups of four and were assigned a number from 1 to 4. Number 1 delivered their talk while 2 peer assessed, 3 timed  and 4 counted the number of times the talker said things such as ‘um’, ‘er’ or ‘like’.

Jigsaw

Pupils are arranged into groups. Each group member is assigned a particular area of the overall topic to become an “expert” in. Pupils then leave their original group to form a new group with other “experts” in the same area. These new groups then discuss the area they have been assigned. After a set amount of time, pupils return to their original groups to feed back their learning in the specialist areas. The original group should then complete a final task that pulls all group member’s learning together.

Numbered Heads

Pupils form groups and assign each group member a number. This number should be a secret from the teacher. The teacher should announce a question and set a time limit. Pupils need to discuss the question to arrive at an answer. The teacher then calls a number and asks the students with that number to answer the question. This means that all pupils need to know the answer to ensure the success of the team. This is a particularly useful activity to use if you wish to add a competitive element to lessons and I find it particularly successful as an aid to revision before assessments.