Productive Student Work Groups

Some form of group work has been part of most teachers' classrooms forever. The challenge is how to make sure that groups are productive and contribute to student learning.

It is important to build both individual and group accountability into every task assigned to a group. Each student must be responsible for his or her contribution and the group must be responsible for the overall task.

A recent study of the most successful group activities found six common characteristics. They included:

• Tasks that emphasized larger learning goals rather than discrete facts and knowledge;
• Teachers provided students with smaller tasks before asking them to tackle larger, longer and more complex tasks;
• Timelines for both individual and group responsibility were explicit in each activity;
• Each task was broken into interim steps or parts so that individuals and the group could monitor their progress toward completing the larger task;
• Students were asked to evaluate their individual work as well as the group's work;
• Teachers included both individual and group evaluations when determining a grade for a project. (Frey, Fisher & Everlove, Productive Group Work, 2009).

It is also important to be sure students have the skills to work collaboratively. Skills at active listening, offering constructive feedback and considering different perspectives are critical.

Because I use groups a lot when I teach I am always looking for resources to make the groups productive. Recently I found a rubric from the authors of Productive Group Work that helps to assess the quality of student groups. It is available at http://www.fisherandfrey.com?page_id=20.