Teaching groups introduction

Marion: Hello. I’m Marion Waite and I’m talking to George Roberts for FSLT13 about teaching groups.

George: Hi Marion

M: George, can you tell me what you do when you approach teaching groups?

G: When I think about teaching groups I think about three things: purpose, process and product.

M: Can you tell me about the process you have taken in thinking about the design of this course?

G: Wow, OK. The process for teaching groups in this course has involved preparing people toundertake peer feedback activities. The first two activities involve individuals submitting a pieceof work, and then giving or receiving feedback from others, maybe as many as three or fourothers, but not really a group conversation. More several one-to-one conversations.

In activities three and four we are asking small groups of people to get together to discuss their microteaching activity and their virtual conference activity.

M: Thank you George. You have outlined the group activities for FSLT13. Can you tell us if there any particular theories you draw upon when planning group work?

G: There are several ways I think about it, mainly coming from conversational theory: Diana Laurillard’s conversational theory postulates conversation between teachers and learners. That is one. In order to have meaningful conversations between people, I think you need relatively small groups. The challenge to us as teachers is how do we take a large group whether that be a face to face lecture course or indeed a massive open online course and break it down into clusters of people who can have those rich learning conversations, which we believe are so important. That is why I talk about purpose, process and product because when you are talkingabout the process of a group it is how do you do the group formation? So many teachers will turnto the class and say. “Oh will you just organise yourselves into groups...” Well, I think you have to be quite a bit more directive than that. Or, at least you need to provide a space where group formation can be made explicit.

M: Thank you George, that’s really interesting. What I think we would like the participants on FSLT todo now is to go onto the teaching groups wiki and look at some of the resources there about group working. And, then consider joining the discussion forum. And, what we’d really like to hear about is your own personal experiences of group work within your educational context. George and I look forward to seeing you there.What we’d like you to do in the forum is to post examples of when you have been in groups,when you have done group work, which has been particularly successful, where you felt good about it, where the outcomes were ones that you would have wanted. And, don’t really tell us about the detail of the event but tell us what the criteria were for successful group work. Why did your groups work well.Thanks very much.