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.
