Week 3: Groups
The theme of the week concerns group work leading to assessment. These groups will meet for weeks or even months, with their efforts usually geared to producing something and being graded on their results.
A second activity this week will be to take a report from one of the course groups last week (Blue or Green group) and move their recommendations forward to implementation.
There are also the usual activities: readings, personal reflection and a podcast to start the week. Have a look at the podcast for a summary of work thus far and setting out the week to come.
Underlying themes
On group work, we will try and move beyond the many generic issues (for teachers and for students), which typically come when students are asked to work with other and be assessed on the results.
Here, we address the question: How to organise, manage and assess groups where students' cultural and language backgrounds are diverse? How can we assure students' learning in such groups?
The answers are unlikely to be simple. Many benefits are claimed for having culturally diverse students in courses, on campus and in your classrooms - you will find them in most universities' marketing material. The day-to-day reality is that students often seem reluctant to move outside their comfort zones to mix and choose to work fellow students. Home and international students often avoid those who are 'not like me', both in and outside class.
Group work can be a vehicle for getting all students out of their cultural 'silos'. The shared task becomes a reason to encounter fellow students. It might be an opportunity to find out others' skills and abilities plus a chance to learn and develop cross cultural capabilities. This does happen. Sadly, the opposite happens as well: diverse groups can be places of conflict, misunderstanding and disappointment.
This week, we will work together to identify how culturally diverse group work can help students to draw upon each others' skills and abilities, to generate collaborative products for assessment, and to use interactions to develop cross-cultural communication skills. Plus we will discuss what to do when these optimal things do not happen.
Reading
- Read Montgomery and McDowell's report on group work (PDF).
Additional resources (optional)
- Chapters 8 and 9 in the course text, Teaching International Students
- The group work section of the Teaching International Students resource
Small group activity
Your group (Blue or Green) will work on the report from the other group. Your job is to have a look at what they have produced. You will see a link to a Google doc containing their results with the other week 3 materials (each group can only see their own link, so your work will be fairly private until you choose to release it).
You are likely to be interested in what they learned, how they suggest to optimise students' learning for their method, and how they dealt with common blocks to student participation and engagement. Do take time to review and think about their work.
- Blue group will work on green group's work on large group activities
- Green group will work on blue group's work on small group activities
Now, your group's job is to create an implementation plan for their recommendations. How could these be put into practice? Do you see any gaps or blocks to making them work?
Start early so others in your group will have time to share ideas and develop an effective implementation plan. When all groups have finished, we will relase all the groups' work and plans to share.
Plenary task
In the plenary task, we will work as a whole group to contribute ideas and resources relevant to four themes on group work in culturally diverse groups. Read others' comments and respond on the discussion board.
We are working towards understanding, exploring and resolving issues which often derail group work plus we are seeking ways to deliver the benefits of collaborative work in culturally diverse groups. So, we are trying to lower the negatives and raise the positives.
This is a general discussion but try and focus your comments on achieving these outcomes: we are aiming for less negative experiences for students (and teachers), more learning and enjoyment for all.
Headings for themes for discussion
- Membership: Is it better to select group membership or to let students select for themselves? What should teachers keep in mind when making this decision?
- Task: The type of task you set is probably the aspect which matters most for collaboration. What kinds of tasks / assignmnents bring the group together and how do they do that? Which sorts encourage isolation? How can you create one that brings people together and avoid the sort of task which students can simply chop into pieces and do serially rather than collaboratively?
- Conflict: Group interaction always has some conflict involved, even if it is just having different opinions - how can it be managed? What would management look like? Is conflict ever a beneficial thing for learning to operate effectively in culturally diverse contexts?
- Assessment: Is it fair to assess the outcome of a culturally diverse group in the same way as you assess a monocultural group's results? Why or why not? How would you assess all students fairly?
We have created a discussion thread for each of these themes - respond to at least two of them early in the week (try to post by Wednesday), and then come back later in the week to respond to other people's thoughts on at least the other two themes.
