Sorry this is late, I left my book at school over the weekend. ooops!!
This chapter focused on 3 areas of concern: group formation, providing content, and introducing group work.
Group formation:
For the most part, he recommends not using ability grouping. Using ability grouping goes against the idea of the group working together to teach each other. Ideally, it should be 1 higher achieving student to 2 lower achieving student.
Putting students together by choice isn't always a bad idea, as long as they are choosing based on interest and not necessarily by who they want to go with. (It is mentioned that choosing friends would be ok if they were working together outside of school.) Randomly assigned students would be okay also. However, student choice and random assignment have a downside. If the groups do not end up with a variety of skills then the groups will not work out the right way.
P.99 has a method of ranking students based on ability level and social factors. I think this is a pretty good idea, but would need to try it to see how it really works out. They also mention the same use of partnering the kids together with a list split in two that Doug Fisher mentioned at the in-service.
Four students per group is ideal, but 3 or 5 would be okay too. The shorter the project, the fewer students you would want because that way all students will be able to share their ideas. It would be okay to have more students work together on a project that takes longer.
It is important that students are grouped using formative assessment, and it would be okay for groups to change if they are not working part way through.
Providing Content-
All students should be working on the same standard, but this can be done in a variety of ways. This section focused on differentiation, which I feel like we have talked about a lot. However, when we roll this part out to staff I am sure it would be beneficial to talk about some specifics. The book talks about varying the texts used for each group. It could be varied by type or level.
Introducing Group Work-
They recommend to start small. Starting with partner-driven conversations is a good place to start. Also, using sentence frames (such as the ones on p. 105) are helpful and of course a lot of MODELING (not sure if you guys knew this yet :) ) They show a 20 implementation guide that seems to be appropriate for centers, but it would be helpful to have some kind of lesson plan to follow for basic groups, such as model how to use sentence frames, work in partners with sentence frames, etc. etc. I'm not sure what it would look like, but I know I would appreciate some very structured way begin getting kids to work productively in groups.
I really like how this chapter answered several questions I was wondering about, but I would still like to SEE how teachers teach students how to use productive group work.
Rule of thumb is four. I think this is good for all of us to remember and to tell our staff.
ReplyDeleteAs Kristin said, alternate ranking is an easy and good way to group students. I think this is something that our staff needs to be introduced to - but I also think that we need to remember that the ranking should be done according to our overall goal. So, pretest results from various data teams might be used, or we might look at how well kids work with others if we are assigning groups for a long-term group project.
I also think it is extremely important to stress that groups can and should change! Just like in step six of data teams, it is important to evaluate and reconstruct/review the outcomes, procedures or grouping. If a group isn’t working well, the teacher and students should be comfortable with changes needing to be made.
I don’t think Kristin or anyone mentioned this ever, but the teacher should be MODELING during the I DO and all interactions they have with students. Might be something to think about.
I like the idea of providing many and different resources to groups with students of different abilities. This is something that we touched on briefly at the beginning of the year with FOCUS, but it really stick. Like all of us, students need to feel successful and have the choice to be. Providing these resources (websites, articles, selections from textbooks, and other trade books) is only setting them up for success.
Oh, hmmmm… sentence starters! Remind anyone of our blue cards?
I enjoyed the authors giving us some basic answers for frequently asked questions and I highlighted most of what Rachel commented on. One important thing to add is on pages 102-104 when they talk about accommodating the mixed skill level of students. It says on page 103, "Consider the perspective offered by a textbook: It serves as a summary of the TEXTBOOK AUTHORS' knowledge of the content." The authors encourage teachers to go beyond the text book and use other resources for content: other pieces of text, interviews, Internet, video clips, guest speakers, picture books, etc. This is refreshing because we have spent a lot of money on content books that are at or below grade level for our struggling readers to understand the content. I am not sure if they are still being used and it would be a great place for teachers to start. I remember talking to Iris and she used the books that had been purchased for her instead of using her textbook at all because she thought the students would better understand the body systems through the books. Maybe we need to remind teachers they have them and it is ok to use them as a supplemental to their textbook?
ReplyDeleteI thought this chapter was very informative. I think this chapter will especially help us answer questions as we introduce these concepts to the staff. Reading this chapter, the following really stuck out to me as good things to remember. Keep groups heterogeneous. If the chemistry of a group is not working, don’t be afraid to rearrange the groups. Introduce PGW slowly through partner work on the first day of school. Provide sentence starters for students so they can learn how to communicate in a learning environment. I think these things can help us to feel more in control of group work and help us to incorporate it effectively in the classroom. I think we gave the staff a great example of using PGW today in our meeting so I am hoping that will help them invest in it!
ReplyDelete