Lowering the Stakes of Small-Group Work
المؤلف:
Tara Goldstein
المصدر:
Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School
الجزء والصفحة:
P76-C4
2025-09-27
334
Lowering the Stakes of Small-Group Work
Yet, given the tensions that can surface in cooperative small group activities that are connected to high-stake projects, like the ISP, which are worth a lot of marks, it is possible to ask whether reserving group work for lower stake activities might be helpful. This can be done in at least two ways. First, group work can be reserved for activities that are not evaluated and make up part of the students' final grade, but are designed to help students prepare for individually graded assignments. Such a strategy would be similar to Mrs. Lo's "classroom practice activities", which helped students prepare for quizzes and tests. To illustrate what such a strategy might look like in an English classroom, I turn to a group work activity Mr. Robertson designed to help his grade 11 students prepare individual essays on William Shakespeare's, Macbeth. The students' task was to develop arguments to support one of eight different statements about the play. An example of such a statement was "Lady Macbeth has sometimes been called the 'fourth witch.' Construct a thesis that argues that she should be regarded as the fourth witch, and support it in an organized essay." A contrasting statement asked students to argue that Lady Macbeth should not be regarded as the fourth witch. Students were placed in eight different linguistically mixed groups and each group was asked to create a flipchart (poster), which provided a thesis statement and supporting evidence for one of the eight statements. After each group had finished their flipchart, they were hung up on the walls of the classroom. Each student then worked individually on a plan for the essay they had chosen to write. Just before the students were scheduled to write their in-class essay, Mr. Robertson gave them a class period to talk to any one of their classmates about their plan and consult the flipcharts on the wall one more time to improve their plans. Tara observed this class period and noted that a number of students worked together in Cantonese as well as English. A lot of students used the period to talk to Mr. Robertson about their plan as well as other students, and many students consulted the flipcharts on the wall. Here group work was planned as a way to assist students to produce strong, individually assessed work. As Mr. Robertson explained, "I was trying to structure the learning for all students in order to ensure that students had good examples of a solid argument of which the teacher approved, and which they could use with full confidence that they would be rewarded" (Member Checking Response, June 12, 2001).
A second way of lowering the stakes of group work activity is to evaluate group processes rather than group products. Teachers can use specific performance criteria to provide students with feedback on how well they approach mixed group tasks; for example, seeking assistance from peers, providing assistance to peers, codeswitching to facilitate group communication, and participating in problem solving.
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