You
can access today’s slides by clicking HERE.
Learning Targets for
today:
- Analyze the College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Speaking and Listening
- Learn how to integrate academic discourse into classroom conversations
- Learn
how to incorporate productive group work routines
It
has been my experience that teachers have some form of group work imbedded in
their weekly lessons. However, it usually is a simple task that student leaders
or “worker bees” complete easily. Students that tend to struggle allow others
to take the lead and are usually left out of the discussion. In the Common Core
standards, instruction needs to be deliberate and students need to be provided
with multiple opportunities to collaborate and engage in group tasks. How can
we do this and what does it look like? Today’s presentation is all about what
that looks like in our classroom. Angelica Paz, David Keys, and I put together
some of our best tips of how to incorporate productive group work in your
classroom. We also recorded our class collaborating. Our goal is that teachers
begin to find ways to gradually release the responsibility of learning to the
students. We should be the facilitators in the classroom and students should
guide their own learning.
Productive Group Work
Productive
group work is part of a larger discussion of effective instruction.
Incorporating group work into lessons involves lessening a teacher’s control
over every aspect of the instructional process, toward asking students to
assume greater responsibility for their learning (Fisher & Frey, 2008).
Fisher and Frey describe the transition in a classroom as moving from one where
the teacher “does it” to one where students “do it together.” They identified
four components to such a classroom:
- Focus Lesson - The teacher establishes the lesson’s purposes and models his or her own thinking for students.
- Guided Instruction - The teacher strategically uses assessment, prompts, and cues and questions to guide students into increasingly complex thinking and students’ assumption of greater responsibility.
- Collaborative Learning - The teacher designs and supervises tasks that enable students to consolidate their thinking and understanding and that require students to produce individual products that enable the teacher to assess their learning.
- Independent Tasks - The teacher designs and supervises tasks that require students to apply the information they have learned in new and authentic products. (SOURCE: Frey, Fisher & Everlove, 2009, p. 6).
ü
Focus
Lesson to establish purpose and modeling
ü
Guided
instruction with cues, prompts and questions
ü
Collaborative
Learning- Consolidating Thinking with peers
ü
Independent
Learning tasks
The
Keys to Productive Group Work
§
Students
must be taught how to talk with one another.
§
Teachers
need to know how to move them.
§
Know
what you’re looking and listening for.
§
Make
tasks engaging and interactive.
How
do we know when Group Work is productive?
§
Knowledge
is built and extended between the exchange of ideas
§
Task
must require Individual Accountability
§
Level
of difficulty so students can consolidate their understanding
§
Too
Easy – Students will divide and conquer and reassemble to turn in
§
Should
be hearing academic language and academic vocabulary – “Using the language of
the lesson”
§
If
the conversation is mostly about logistics then we’ve missed the mark
I
prepared terrific freebies for you! Click on the following link to access a
bunch of my posters I use to set up collaborative groups and rubrics to measure success.
Productive
Group Work:
The Role of Collaboration in Learning
§ Done
properly, productive group work results in:
• Increased
self esteem
• Improved
relationships among students
• Enhanced
social and communication skills
• Higher
levels of academic learning and retention than peers working individually
In successful cooperative groups, each member has a
task with the teacher as a frequent monitor and “guide on the side” instead of
the “sage on the stage.”
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