Diagnostic Question Group Work

Children worked in 3s and were reminded of effective collaborative groups.

Their task was to decide on the answer and write an explanation to show their thinking. They would then bring this to me, but the obstacle is that I can ask anyone from the group to explain how they got the answer. If they could not give a clear explanation that shows they have understood they have to go back and work on it again. If they did, they would be given a new question.

It was really interesting to see this in action, especially watching some of the children having to take the role of the teacher - also having to keep their frustration in check!

30mins later...no clear explanations given yet. Also noticed one child not getting involved in the group - so had to talk to the rest of that group and ask them how they were going to ensure that this person became more responsible towards their group. However, the rest of the class were engaged and taking responsibility for their group to succeed and for them to try and understand from their peers.

Tuesday 1st May - what's next?

Last year I was really on top of my goal as it was something that affected my every day teaching and I could really see the benefit of it for the children. I haven't felt the same way this year. Group work happens most weeks in the classroom, but not collaborative as such. This last inquiry topic (space) has been independent based and so there has been much opportunity to do so much recently.

So for the next 7 weeks my plan is to...

The next inquiry topic will involve the children working in small groups - 3s I think. This will provide us with a great opportunity to really focus on our collaborative skills. I will try and record more of how it goes in order to provide further evidence. 

Also in the maths planning I will add a more collaborative task once a week. There are some really nice diagnostic questions from White Rose on this site:
https://diagnosticquestions.com/Quizzes/Go#/67524/5863685
What is really lovely about them is that they are multiple choice, which relieves some stress for the weaker children and it will also provide opportunities for discussion if they disagree with one another. The children will have to agree as a group on their answer and be able to give an explanation for it - this could be recorded on Seesaw. An example is here:

I also forgot that I had a book from my previous school which is actually called 'Groups Work, Collaborative Problem Solving for all Abilities'. I think the class are now ready for some of these challenges. The aim of each activity is for them to work as a group to solve the problems. 

At the end of the term I will use the 'how effective were your group' which was used right at the start of this goal. After each group has filled it in, we will compare it to the one they filled in last time and see what progress (hopefully) has been made. 

Some Success!

Children were working in research groups finding out about the reproduction parts of a plant. We reviewed each taking on a responsibility within the group and reinforced that they were all responsible for the end outcome.

It was great to be able to go around and speak to the groups, asking them how they were working as a group.

Ongoing focus

Cooperative groups is no easy fix. Sometimes the class are great, sometimes the majority are and sometimes it all falls apart. But I think that it is something that needs encouragement and needs nourishing. Reminders about roles and responsibilities to reinforce expectations, children to really understand what the process will be in order for their group to be successful needs to be explicitly explained and discussed each time. So we will persist.

Cooperative Groups - Bees

On Monday the children were placed into ability groups (based on reading levels) for our provocation for our new topic, Sharing The Planet. The children were the poster below.

In their groups they were given one website to use and had to find as many facts as possible to answer the question, 'Why bees are important to humans?' They were reminded about how we work as groups and how were they going to ensure that group members were not writing the same facts.

I was really pleased with the way the groups worked. There was one all girl group who just got on with it, communicated amazingly well and had no fuss. Unfortunately, 2 boys did let their group down by not putting in the effort. We talked about this.

Their final task was to use the facts to come up with a group answer - one sentence. Everyone had to agree and understand the answer. They all managed it!

Not going so well

At the end of last term I was mortified when we did a rotation activity in Year 5 and both teachers feedback about my class and how they worked together was very negative.

So although I feel that within the classroom and during specific group work tasks the children have made good progress about how to work together it is still far from perfect.

This term I will devote half an hour each week to specific collaborative teamwork tasks. Some ideas that I am going to use/adapt come from the following sites.

http://www.teachhub.com/6-awesome-cooperative-classroom-games

http://www.momjunction.com/articles/team-building-activities-will-keep-kids-busy-summer_0074763/

UPDATE
or 10 minutes a day might be more effective and realistic!
Talked to SD and RK yesterday about how this was going. They both gave some great advice and SD shared a couple of activities that he had done with his class with me this morning - getting children to think about positives about children in their class that they admire or who they work well with - not close friends.

Job Roles

During out global read aloud we had arranged to skype our school in America. Each class needed to present (in groups) to the other school what they thought the message of the Wild Robot was.

So this seemed an ideal time to discuss beforehand how best they were going to achieve success in working as a group. We talked about having different roles, so not only did they need to work as a group, but that they were also responsible for their individual role.

The children decided that they would need:

This worked really well for most of the lesson. Each person in the group had a role and everyone seemed to be engaged and on task throughout. More of this type of 'job roles' is needed.