Challenges of Using Students Groups
What are some challenges of having students work in groups?
One of the challenges that is when 2 or 3 students in the group are close friends. They may tend to talk amongst themselves and not fully participate in the group activity.
On the opposite end, if there is someone in a group that doesn't get along with their group or even 1 person in the group- sometimes that person gets alienated by the rest of the group.
Having experienced working in groups myself, I have found that there are always 2 out of the 6 that are dominant, 2 that are moderately involved, and 2 that can easily sit there and do nothing. Sometimes the issue is that I'm bored with the material and simply don't want to participate. I'm hoping that a strong team member will call me out and encourage participation.
I believe that in setting up a group myself I need to rotate around the room and speak briefly with each group, maintaining a positive attitude.
You must be teaching in a traditional program. Our's is an accelerated one and there is no time wasted on chatting because they are trying to carve time out between home, work, clinical and class to do their projects.If they are lucky they will get 20 minutes of class time to decide how they are going to do the project and who is responsible for what, after that they are on their own to work it out and it is usually done via e-mail and phone calls.
I had my students do peer evals but they all just gave everybody full marks. There was no honesty in their responses at all. Even when they had complained to me about a student who hadn't done their job.
Wow, wish I had thought of that I only had a project rubric but a role rubric would have taken care of the non participatory student from the get go.
Great idea Thanks!
How to not penalize a group for the failure of a particular group member not doing their share of the work was a challenge for me.
I gave them contracts to fill out and sign but it just wasn't terribly successful. There's always someone with an excuse every time and promises not kept.
It seems a shame for the group to suffer or the shirker to benefit from the group's efforts.
I should have put in a clause that said if all the group was in agreement that a group member didn't participate that they would get a zero. But I didn't think of putting that in the contract.
My biggest challenge is getting students work together that would not otherwise work together. I feel it is important to shuffle the student groups.
My biggest challenge is the fact that we have very small classes (always hoping for more enrollments to change that!) My students have a lot of "hands-on" learning to do and that means 2 people to a group, sometimes 3. The challenge I have is keeping track of who has worked with who, so they don't always work with the same person. Also, if there is a group project I want them to do, it's just one group. In that case, I need to monitor closely to be sure everyone is involved and being included. The benefit of small classes is that they DO work well with one another because they know each other quite well.
I always tend to have two challenges. The first one is making sure that 1 or 2 students are not doing the work while the others do other things. The other issue is getting all the groups to participate in the assignment. I usually will have groups working on the same scenario. I will give them a certain amount of time to complete the scenario. At the end I will ask each group how they handled the scenario. Some times the second and third group will just say, we did it the same as the first group. This defeats the purpose of the exercise.
dividing the students into groups and start doing challenging practice between the groups will help them to compete and improve themselves
I believe that student groups are helpful in developing collaborative skills, which can be applied in a work environment. However, on some occasions less motivated students can benefit from the hard work of their peers.
Jeff,
these are great challenges to point out & good ones for us to remember so we can prepare for these.
Ryan Meers, Ph.D.
Tim, you bring up a good point, how can we reduce some of the participants from "coasting" through group projects?
In the past, I have provided students with peer-rubrics to assess all members involved in the group. Each group member provides a grade to each student participant within the group, anonymously. If there are six members to a group, each member is graded by five individuals anonymously. Then, the average of the five rubrics count towards the participation points for the assignment/project at hand. Thus far, this approach has assisted in discouraging students from using the "coast" method during group projects.
One of the problems I have had in the past with group work is that students tend to become load during their interaction. Hence, the students are working effectively, but the noise level increases as the students become excited about the task at hand.
How can I possibly reduce the noise without discouraging students from enjoying the project?
Challenges of student groups:
1. Finding a project that truly requires a group instead of one that really doesn't fit.
2. Workload distribution- so slackers don't ride on coattails of people actually doing the work- no one benefits.
Students tend to congregate with their friends so they often do not get much done. There is always one or two students who do not want to be in a group. There is also the problem of some students pulling all the weight while other students do very little. The benefits of working in a group are important enough to push through and find solutions to these challenges.
One of the challenges is to keep the groups focused on the topic of the activity and not veer of into a different subject.
One of the toughest challenges is to keep everyone on task. You have to constantly monitor each group and each student within that group.Some students like to jump right in, and other you have to motivate a little.
The most obvious challenge I've encountered when having my students work in groups is personality clashes. It's almost like they forget that they are doing an assignment and lose track of what they're there for. I strongly encourage everyone to work together because in the profession that they have chosen to go into there are MANY, MANY different personalities that they will HAVE to work with to get the job done.
