Student Groups

Grouping students is a very important and challenging task in the classroom. There are many different aspects as to influence how you group together students. For the unit plan created in ED 605, a majority of the activities planned require students to work with others ranging from partners up to groups of three or four.

There are a few factors I would take into account when deciding if it is a good choice to group students together and which student groupings work well. To decide if grouping students together is best, I would need to look at the purpose of the activity and what I want them to accomplish. If I want students to be exposed to different viewpoints or opinions, group work would be best for that, but if I want students to develop their own unique ideas then individual work would be best in that situation.

Besides what purpose the activity is, deciding which students work together best is another factor. Some students do not work well with each and so it’s important to make sure those students are not grouped together. Another thing to consider is student level and which students may complement one another. For example, you could pair a strong student with a weaker student so that the stronger student gets practice explaining the concepts and the weaker student gets a little individual help from a peer so both parties benefit.

The skills of the students also play a part. You should try to either group students with similar skill levels in reading and writing unless you are purposefully putting students who are not on the same level for the purpose of helping each student out as mentioned above. If the students are of similar reading and writing skills then more emphasis can be placed on using those skills in the context of a STEM classroom.

If a teacher doesn’t take these factors into account then problems can occur. For example, I once had a group where two students absolutely hated working with each other to the point where they would argue the entire class instead of working. Both students were incredibly smart, but just did not like working with each other. I had to rework groups after that, but that goes to show the effect of bad groups. With bad groups, you lose productivity and lose the effectiveness of the lesson plan. It gets in the way of the learning and so even though it seems like such a simple thing, choosing groups plays a big impact in a classroom.