Groupwork

While we often read about the advantages of groupwork, it is always a helpful reminded that just places students in close proximity to each other does not always promote healthy groupwork. There is a difference between groupwork and cooperative learning. "The Dilemma of Groupwork" brought up some interesting ideas that I had not spent much time reading about before. The first time Mrs. Todd put her groups together without any prior planning I wasn't entirely surprised that it didn't work out, but I was surprised at all the different dynamics in a group that group members probably are not even consciously aware of. After reading the article it left me wondering how to solve the issue though. Cohen wrote that even when teachers tried to place students of similar abilities together they were still able to fine tune who they thought were the higher level students among themselves. If this is the case, what can teachers do to get all students involved? One thing that comes to my mind is giving each student a specific task within the group. This ensures that they have to get involved, especially if the tasks are integral to the groupwork. But about if students are just gathering to talk about an idea? Can you always structure groupwork so each student has a specific task? I wondered about the application of groupwork in math. In my field my CT always has the students in pairs. They are arranged so they have the same partners for a month or two at a time and students are paired with uneven levels of ability. Is this a good method of bypassing the internal ranking of groupwork? I wondered how it would apply to the work being done in the students in the DMI text this week. When Eleanor gave her lesson to the students it seems like they worked by themselves to come up with different methods of solving the problem. Would this many different methods have emerged if students had worked in groups? Would some of the students voices been ignored, thus losing valuable contributions? But perhaps even more refined ideas would have emerged. This is something that has really left me wondering. In Lauren's case she had a handful of students that were very confused about keeping place value in their head. Lauren was working with them but if they were all in a group together would they have stayed confused because they all had similar abilities? Maybe in a mixed ability group they could have solved the problem. Much of math has to do with making sense of how numbers work. It seems like groupwork would be ideal for this. I think group size is very important. For small problems like this I would think more than 3 would be too many. This limits the group dynamic issues that were brought up in Cohen. It is hard for one persons ideas to be ignored if there is only one other person in the group. Many students might think of math as a subject they don't enjoy because they see it as a solitary subject. If teachers really think of ways to integrate cooperative learning in a way that does not disadvantage some group members, all students could benefit from the activity.