Together as a team - effective team work

Carrying out tasks in groups promotes the involvement of the whole class in learning. By working in groups, students have much more opportunities to express themselves, take initiative and make choices. The more often we offer students group work as a form of lesson activity, the greater the chances that the work will become more and more effective over time. effective team work.

Before we start

When deciding to use group work, it is worth remembering that it is process-oriented. It takes many repetitions for the results to satisfy us. On the other hand, the tasks themselves, which we propose to students as part of this form of activity, should fulfill the lesson objective - learning completed, closed within a lesson unit.

A class is a group. Therefore, before we start working in smaller teams, it is worth establishing common rules that will organize work in the class group and smaller subgroups. However, these should not be teacher's rules, but rules created together with the students.

 Group size

Working in groups is associated by students and teachers with working in teams composed of several students. Meanwhile, group work starts from 2 people! It is worth appreciating this number, because the results of the work of 2s are similar to the results of the work of 4s. I conducted an experiment in which I divided the trainees into 3 groups of two and three groups of four. The task of the groups was to list the advantages and disadvantages of waste segregation: pairs listed 7, 13 and 15 advantages and disadvantages, respectively, and groups 10, 13, 17 features. My experiment allows us to conclude that in this case the quality of work did not depend on the number of people - the results depend primarily on the involvement of the participants.

Selection of group members

There can be many ideas for selecting group members.

• When it is not important for the students' work who will work with whom, it is worth using drawing lots. You can draw cards of different colors, candies, numbers, maths that will show the right result.
• People in groups can also combine common preferences. Broth fans will gather separately, and tomato soup fans will gather separately, while ice cream lovers will stand against chocolate.
• Students can also be instructed to count the letters in the surname, to select groups in terms of the number of vowels in the name or, when entering the class, to count down as many groups as possible.
• My quick way to group groups when I don't have to think about who will work with whom is to draw sticks with the names of the students. On a daily basis, I use them to draw students who answer questions related to the lesson. I draw sticks and put them on the appropriate benches. The student sits on this bench where the stick with his name is. It also happens that the students, knowing the idea of ‹‹the draw, change their lot because they want to be in a group with a specific student. When I notice such a situation, please put your fate back into the envelope, box or box and draw at the end. This has nothing to do with the penalty imposed on the student, but rather with increasing his / her ability to work with different people. In adulthood, the student will not always have the opportunity to work with those he likes.
• Sometimes it is also worth letting students form groups or pairs on their own.
• Another way that requires more commitment from the teacher is to create aptitude groups. Such a model will be difficult to apply at the beginning of our work with class. However, the more we get to know students, their way of working, problems, dysfunctions, character traits, and perceptive abilities, the better we can manage the group

Equal commitment to work

Every teacher dreams of a situation in which all students commit themselves to tasks. However, are such situations possible and how to increase the effectiveness of learning? A solution worth adopting is to guide the group in such a way as to indicate the stages of the work. This requires the teacher to plan tasks.

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Below is an example of a command with success criteria to make a lapbook with information about the world presented in the reading:

• You enter the author and the title of the book.
• You choose the main and side heroes.
• You define the narrator and indicate his features.
• You indicate time and place.
• You present the most important events in the form of a plan.
• You indicate the events related to the initiation of the action, development and dissolution of the action and the climax
• You write down keywords that are associated with your reading.

Students, having specific tasks to do, are better able to plan and distribute work. Providing the author and title of the book and writing it down in a lapbook certainly does not take as much time as arranging the events to be read in the form of a plan. It is important that the tasks that the groups receive are specific. Each of us likes to know what exactly to do. The students too. An ally of involving students in carrying out tasks is also indicating the time. You can set a timer or an egg timer. Students' involvement can also be increased by asking them to write together as a group the tasks that each of them was doing.

In groups, however, there are also students who do not want to work. Then what? My way is to create a group with such a student. The teacher can also join the group of the student who is reluctant to work and support him in completing the task. You can also create a group with students with reduced task motivation or with learning difficulties. It is then important to differentiate between tasks. Different tasks will be given to students with learning difficulties, other to gifted students, and other tasks to students who can cope with learning without major achievements. The tasks of the weakest group can be the starting point for more difficult tasks.

Noise and walks around the classroom ...

Introducing group work may be accompanied by a little noise at first, but training makes the master. The more often we offer students to work in groups, the quieter it is. The raised hand method works well in the class I work with. It is worth making an agreement with students that when it is too loud, they can raise their hand. At this point, everyone in the class is required to raise their hand up, and when raising it, you are not allowed to say anything. At the beginning, it is often the teacher who initiates peace in the classroom, but over time the students take over this role.

Teachers also report the problem of walking around the classroom when working in a group. Sometimes scheduled tasks require it. If the group lacks knowledge, skills or materials, the student may go to another group and ask for help. Also, the method of task stations forces the movement of individual groups. Is there anything wrong with that? It is a matter of being open to the needs of students and the teacher's readiness to face it. It is worth asking yourself whether walking around the classroom while working in groups actually interferes with learning.

Assessing work in groups

Assessing group work is difficult. If we evaluate the task performed by a specific student, we will evaluate their knowledge. However, how to evaluate cooperation, friendly help, commitment? I do not rate group work with a summative assessment. However, I always provide an oral or written commentary. Sometimes I also prepare feedback for a completed task. Most often this is the way I evaluate the written statements prepared in the group. Then I tell the students what they did right, what they did wrong, how it should be corrected and how to work in the future so as not to make this mistake.

Peer assessment also works well. Students can exchange the materials prepared in the group and write a comment on them or mark with lights whether the task has been done well (green) or whether the task has to be worked on (red), or maybe there are only minor defects (orange). Or, you can suggest that students write down what they have done before or after they start the activity.

Group or team work

Teamwork is not only about working in a group. In order for classroom work to follow a teamwork model, the teacher should ask himself the following questions:

• Do students work in groups while completing the task?
• Do students share responsibility?
• Do students make decisions together?
• Is student work dependent?

If the answer to all four questions is yes, then the students are working according to the teamwork criteria.

I applied this model of work during a series of lessons developing the ability to write and deliver speeches and to write an official letter on recycling. My students also organized a part-of-speech fair in this way, which served as a revision of the message. In groups, they created tasks that aimed to use the knowledge about parts of speech. First, they tested them themselves, and then invited other sixth-grade students to test themselves.

Working in a group - unnecessary effort?

If we approach group work as a process that is to equip our students with, among other things, social competences, the answer is no. It is worse when we look at group work from the perspective of difficulties: noise, uneven involvement of students, extensive preparation for lessons, defining tasks for groups or allowing students to take responsibility for their own learning. It's worth the trouble. However, each teacher has to answer for himself, is he ready for it?