The Teacher’s Role in Small Group Work

As a participation structure, small groups convey the message that everyone has valuable experiences and thinking to contribute. For students to experience this message as reality, the teacher has an important role, first of all, in establishing a safe environment, and then in setting the parameters for group work and mentoring groups’ interactions, as follows:

• Specify the procedures and expected products of group work
• Monitor small group processes, and mentor students by modeling appropriate group interactions and asking probing questions that facilitate thoughtful approaches to the work.
• Listen in to group conversations and collect examples of group exchanges and ideas to bring back to the ensuing class discussion.
• Ask students to reflect on and assess their own and their group members’ contributions to group products.
• Underscore students’ accountability for the work and their responsibilities to one another by giving students a group grade and an individual grade.

Structuring Small Groups

The goal of group work is for group members to contribute equally to the substantive work—the thinking, reflecting, trying out and observing, writing, discussing, and so forth. Students will need to understand this goal, because their first inclination may be to divide up the substantive work rather than to collaborate. The following guidelines support equitable participation by group members and participation by all students in a variety of grouping arrangements.

• The size of a small group should actually be small. Four members is ideal, and when the groups don’t come out even, three is better than five.
• Vary group membership decisions according to your purposes:
  • To increase interpersonal knowledge and community
  • To establish stable working relationships
  • To create interest groups
  • To balance skills and experiences within and across groups
  • To occasionally provide targeted support and⁄or independence
• When students first begin working in small groups, it is sometimes helpful to assign roles so that everyone knows what to do. Some process roles include the following:
  • Facilitator (distributes turns equitably, moves the group through assigned tasks)
  • Recorder (writes notes to record or capture group thinking, writes up group work to turn in)
  • Reporter/spokesperson (presents the group’s work to the assigned audience)
  • Process observer (reports to the group on how individuals participated and how the group worked together)
• Sometimes you may want to put students into groups that become expert on particular content and then share what they learn. This sharing could be in the form of group presentations to the class or in the form of a “jigsaw,” in which expert groups disperse to exchange information in “home” groups made up of one member of each different “expert” group. The content selected for such groups should be related in ways that allow students to see relationships and make important connections across topics.
• Sometimes you may want to support a particular group of students as they work with particular content or skills while other students work in independent groups. Grouping students in this way should always be temporary, not permanent. All readers, whether they are perceived to be strong or struggling, benefit from substantial opportunities to work in heterogeneous groups where students work together and share their expertise.

Reading for Understanding, pp.125-126