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The point of group work is to provide active learning activities that help students master content to a deep level and also develop skills in doing important things with the content. This will enable students to recall and use concepts from your course in future courses and life beyond university, more so than they would otherwise likely gain from the lecture format only. Research evidence bears this out (Spronken-Smith, Batchelor, O’Steen, & Angelo, p. 57).

Essential aspects of group work

Share your reasons for using group work, explaining that it is based on research evidence on the scholarship of teaching and learning. It is motivating for students if they understand the benefits of collaborative learning, and including them in discussions about teaching techniques helps them think about how they learn and moves them down the road towards becoming self-managing learners. Otherwise, students may think you are using group work to avoid lecturing or course preparation.

1. Task identification: Group work is best for application activities, where students have to do something useful (that is, connected to knowledge and skills outcomes). Some examples are:

• Solving “ill structured problems” (examples or vignettes that have both relevant and irrelevant information, unlabelled, and students need to figure out what is relevant and what to do)
• Deciding between equally appealing alternatives
• Discussing or debating issues
• Categorizing or prioritizing ideas

The activity should strike a balance between providing a challenging task that demands higher-level thinking, and (b) enough supportive structure that students can reasonably be expected to meet this challenge. Completing these types of tasks in a group rather than individually may help students overcome fear and anxiety that demanding assignments may provoke.

2. Timing: Prior to lecturing, to help students recall prior knowledge and to heighten interest:

• Formulating group responses a series of true/false or agree/disagree statements relating to upcoming lecture material.
• Brainstorming/free associating about the upcoming lecture topic

Prior to another type of active learning activity (e.g., group activity, discussion, or video), develop questions they hope will be addressed in an upcoming class discussion.

After another type of active learning activity (e.g., after a class discussion where group members identify positions or issues that were overlooked in the discussion, or share whether their pre-discussion opinions were changed or strengthened).

During the lecture, at a critical point ask groups to compare notes, resolve conflicting ideas or perspective, develop specific examples, or create possible test questions.

An end-of-class activity, to respond as a group to lecture concepts with a group "minute paper" or "reaction paper," a statement of what they learned or what issues they feel are still unresolved or unclear.

3. Group composition:

The instructor should create groups that will be involved in topics that require critical thinking (e.g., evaluation or synthesis) or personal opinion (e.g., values or diversity).

Create homogenous groups (similar academic major or with similar course interests, residential proximity, class and work schedules if group continues outside of class) to promote bonding, productivity, and synergy among group members.

Create heterogenous groups (different or diverse with respect to gender, cultural background, age, student status (e.g., direct-from school and re-entry students), levels of academic achievement, learning styles, and/or personality profiles) to promote critical thinking, appreciation of diversity, cultural harmony and to increase friendships amongst people of diverse backgrounds.

Forming groups based on proximity or students’ choice is quickest, especially for large classes. The trade-off is that less is learned because students end up working with friends or, at least, the same people.

You can randomly assign students to groups by

• Counting off and grouping them according to number
• Having them line up according to birthday, height, hair colour, etc., before dividing them;
• Distributing candy (e.g., Starburst or hard, coloured candies) and group students according to the flavour they choose.

When diversity within the group is important, assign students according to information you collect from each student, perhaps on index cards or in email, on the first day of class in which they offer important information about their backgrounds, knowledge, and interests. Or, ask students to state their preferences (e.g., list three students with whom they would most like to work, or two topics they would most like to study), and take them into account as you assign them to groups.

4. Group size:

Standard practice is groups ranging in size from 3-6 students. Larger groups (5-6 students) are more likely to ensure that individual students are exposed to a rich diversity of viewpoints and thinking styles with respect to the group task. As group size increases, the trade-off is that

• Each person participates less often, and
• It’s easier to coast on other people’s work (aka “social loafing”)
• It’s harder for each group member to learn all the knowledge and skills that are the point of the group activity.
• The logistics of group meetings outside of class (for assignments) become more time consuming.

An even number of group members makes it easier to form equal-sized subgroups for specific partial tasks.

5. Group duration:

If group composition is changed every class or two, students have a wider variety of experiences. Longer duration may foster social cohesion and bonding (emotional ties) among teammates, which are good for many types of more complex tasks. Also, if students know that they will be working with the same people for a long time, then they are more likely to try to resolve group conflicts.

You can take advantage of the benefits of both short and long term groups by having “ad hoc" groups with varying membership and more permanent "base" groups with stable membership throughout the course. Short-term groups may be used for brief, non-threatening tasks (e.g., brainstorming) while long-term groups may be used for cumulative tasks (e.g., group projects) or tasks involving sensitive issues (e.g., personal values).

6. Teaching how to work together:

Long-term groups need team building activities, such as ice breaker games and team identity formation activities such as creating a team name, photo, and exchanging contact information.

Long-term groups work toward a common product by reaching consensus, or one of the other decision-making methods in the table below. Instructors are wise to provide group work structure through worksheets and lists, and have groups create charts, concept maps, or slide presentations to be shown to the instructor and other groups.

It is a good idea to set up interdependent but complementary roles within the group. “Job descriptions” for each are a bonus. Different types of roles include:

• Functional roles, such as recorder, spokesperson, project manager to keep people on time and task, accuracy coach or editor, researcher, “devil’s advocate” to test ideas.
• Cognitive roles, that contribute one aspect of critical thinking to the group's final product (e.g., application, synthesis, or evaluation); or contributing one important perspective or viewpoint (e.g., ethical, social, or economic perspective). These roles will be more effectively performed if the instructor explicitly identifies, models, and assigns them.

Should you have group members keep or switch roles over time?

The benefit of role stability is the higher level of performance that comes from opportunities to practice the same task several times and to learn from those experiences.

The benefit of rotating roles amongst team members over time is to "stretch" the student beyond their comfort zone a bit to learn new skills. For example, some students may never develop public speak skills unless they are required to take the role of group "spokesperson." It may be necessary for the instructor to assign specific roles to students rather than allowing them to self-select roles for this to happen.

Techniques for improving listening skills: Ask each team member to correctly paraphrase or restate the idea of the teammate who spoke previously, before contribute her or his own idea. Variation: team members say something to affirm some aspect of the previous speaker’s comment (e.g., its clarity, creativity, or most powerful point) before contributing.

Structured teamwork can reinforce good teamwork skills by requiring peer evaluation of all team members, or a combination of self, peer, and instructor evaluation, all using the same evaluation rubric. This makes everyone accountable to each other, as is typically the case in collaborative work environments. The following links are examples as idea starters for creating your own evaluation rubric:

Rubric for Assessment of Teamwork Skills

Design & Teach A Course - Sample

Students can improve their team work skills through the workshop "Unlocking the Secrets to Gret Group Work" part of Student Affairs and Services Student Success Series.

Interpersonal skills are best learned by “situating" these skills within performance tasks, rather than teaching them separately—they will be more likely to "take hold" or be internalized by students and applied in other small-group settings. It also helps, while doing this, to provide tips on effective skills for communicating and relating to others, such as:

• Encouraging and supporting other group members
• Active listening
• Constructive disagreement
• Conflict resolution
• Consensus building

Methods of making group decisions:

7. Instructor’s role:

Don’t sit in on groups (unless invited) but quietly circulate around the room to:

• Ensure that groups understand the task and stay focused on it.
• Encourage and reinforce instances of cooperation and critical thinking.
• Experience directly students' thought processes, conceptual errors, and depth of reasoning.
• Offer encouragement, catalyze dialogue.
• Issue timely questions that encourage elaboration and higher-order thinking.

Tell students what you will be doing as you circulate and why, so you don’t dampen group interaction because they think you may be “spying.” Also, interacting with groups in this way helps instructors to know students better, which will help focus lecture material and find examples that resonate.

The instructor’s role during group work is to foster a learning environment where all students feel safe and comfortable interacting with their peers, by establishing a classroom climate where students are encouraged to express their ideas without fear of rejection or recrimination, denigration is forbidden, and where diversity is appreciated, not merely tolerated. Interventions should be unobtrusive, empowering rather than interfering with the development of self-reliance and independence from authority.

8. Full class learning from group work:

For knowledge and skills that everyone needs to master, the group work must be structured in such a way as to ensure that everyone in the group gets them, and that the division of labour in the group-produce product does not prevent this from happening. There is such a thing as overspecialization of labour. Also, if the work roles are set up and/or rotated to ensure everyone does things that will result in them mastering all the knowledge and skills, there needs to be accountability to make sure the work unfolds as planned. This can be done through peer evaluation according to criteria in an evaluation rubric.

There are several ways to “put it all together” for the class after group work activities:

• Report back to class: Each group’s reporter shares its main ideas with the class. The instructor can write the main ideas reported from each group on a visual display the whole class can see, validating their contributions, and identifying important themes and variations across groups.
• Reporters to groups: Each group has a "roving reporter" who visits other groups to share her or his team's ideas. Remaining members of her or his team stay together and act as "listener-synthesizers" who actively listen to the ideas presented by successive roving reporters from other groups and integrate the new ideas with those originally generated by their own team.
• Group-share-and-synthesize: Rotate each small group clockwise to merge with another small group to share and synthesize their separate work. The process continues until each group has had a paired interaction all other learning groups in class. The final step is for each team to generate a final product which is a composite of their own work and the best ideas gleaned from their interactions with other groups.

9. Should the group work be done outside of class?

This is fine but keep in mind the logistical challenges of meeting outside of class and putting disparate parts of a project together often make the time and effort of group learning higher than for individual projects. You need to figure out how to streamline this process.

Types of groups

These challenges were reported in a survey of hundreds of professors using peer instruction in a variety of disciplines (Fagan, Crouch & Mazur):

References

Bacon, D. R. (2005). The Effect of Group Work on Content-Related Learning. The Journal of Management Education, 29(2).

Cuseo, J. (undated). Guidelines for Group Work. 

Cuseo, J. & Smith, N. (Undated). Cooperative/Collaborative Structures Explicitly Designed To Promote Positive Interdependence Among Group Members. 

Brookfield, S. D & Preskill, S. (1999). Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.

Spronken-Smith, R.; Walker, R.; Batchelor, J.; O’Steen, B. & Angelo, T. (2012). Evaluating student perceptions of learning processes and intended learning outcomes under inquiry approaches. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 37(1). 

University of British Columbia Learning Commons. Group Process. 

University of Guelph Learning Services Handout. Group Work. 

University of Waterloo Centre for Teaching Excellence. Group Work in the Classroom: Types of Small Groups.

University of Waterloo Centre for Teaching Excellence. Meeting Strategies to Help Prepare Students for Group Work. 

University of Waterloo Centre for Teaching Excellence. Group Work in the Classroom: Small Group Tasks. 

University of Waterloo Centre for Teaching Excellence. Implementing Group Work in the Classroom. 

University of Waterloo Centre for Teaching Excellence. Group Decision Making.