When Group Work Gets Old

Group work – getting students to work together in groups to solve some kind of problem – is a go-to lesson plan item for me and most of the teachers I know. And it isn’t just a matter of personal preference: the effectiveness of group work is backed by decades of research. As John Bean points out in Engaging Ideas, in a good group activity students don’t just pool their knowledge; they propose possible answers or solutions to each other as they prepare to deliver a collective solution or answer to the class, which they must defend. Such activities are far from foolproof, of course. You can design or deliver them poorly, or not have enough students in class that day, or be faced with an especially high percentage of students insufficiently prepared for the day’s work, and so on. But learning-by-doing pretty much always beats out learning-by-watching-and-listening.

It's also true, though, that you can’t do group activities all the time. You can’t do anything all the time because whatever it is gets dull and formulaic. So what to do instead? What to do that still engages students in something active but is sufficiently different to contrast with problem-solving in small groups? Plenary discussion, another go-to, is an obvious choice, and when it works it’s great. But I find it difficult, not going quite as well as I want it to about half the time. Instead, what’s been working for me is a kind of plenary, public workshopping of particular aspects of students’ writing. Today those aspects were thesis statements and supporting claims (research questions are another I tackle with this method).

Next week they must turn in an outline of a paper and workshop it in pairs, so this week we generated the main ingredients of those outlines. One at a time, I display questions on my projected computer screen that guide students through the process of honing a topic and creating thesis statements and supporting claims. I give several minutes of quiet work time for each question, which feels like a lot but is necessary, and after each one I say something like, “Who wants to volunteer what they’ve got before I start cold-calling on people?”

I should say that through all this I’m creating an atmosphere where it’s okay to fail, but unacceptable to not try – not in the sense that there’s some sort of punishment, but that if I call on you and you simply have nothing, we will talk it out and get you something. To create that atmosphere I might talk about my own difficulties with doing research-based writing, emphasizing that it’s hard for everyone – really hard. Good claims and good sentences don’t usually drop onto your head like Newton’s apple; they have to be worked and thought about, maybe even talked through. (I think of, but haven't shared with students, a line from John Gardner's The Art of Fiction: “Mastery is not something that strikes in an instant, like a thunderbolt, but a gathering power that moves steadily through time, like weather.”)

When someone offers their thesis I type it up on my projected screen and collect another, and another, till I have a half dozen or so, and then I go through them one by one, saying what’s strong about it and where it needs work, giving suggestions and asking questions. The idea is that everyone sees the back-and-forth of that claim getting stronger and each student absorbs a few concrete techniques for subjecting their own claims to productive scrutiny – specifying vague words, making assumptions plain, and just making sure that what they have really is an arguable claim and not something else.  

Coming up with supporting claims is harder, partly because they’re a harder concept to wrap your head around when you’re first learning how to write academic prose. While most students in the latter weeks of a class on research-based writing can go directly from topic to thesis without too much trouble, attempting to go from a nascent essay’s main claim to its supporting claims can be tough, even demoralizing. So on the screen, beneath the volunteered and tweaked thesis statements, I’ll write questions that are designed to move students toward supporting claims. On a thesis arguing that removing organized sports from colleges would benefit current and future students, I asked what offices, or institutions, or groups of people would be so improved upon the implementation of this proposal that even future generations of students would benefit, with the idea that the answers to these questions will anchor this student’s supporting claims in specific entities. To a student claiming that college sports do more good than harm, I asked what specific goods do they do, and what specific harms, and how do we know there are more of the former? (The reason we’re focused on college athletics is a longer story I won’t go into.)   

I try to spread my attention around evenly, but I must admit there are some students I don’t call on as much. Everyone gets called on at least once in the semester during a public workshopping exercise like this. But I’ll find ways to work more individually with those who clearly do not benefit from this kind of public work, whether they are shy, or self-conscious about their language skills, or something else.

Speaking of “language skills,” there’s another benefit to this exercise: Students see (with my help, because I’m directing their attention toward it) that the real work of writing lies not in crafting grammatically standardized sentences, but in the shaping of ideas that are in tension with other ideas, and that this can be done in a variety of Englishes, each with its own accents and inflections, each coming from a unique cultural position. My classroom is - indeed our classrooms are - a place of diverse languages and styles of speaking and writing, and when each of those styles takes center stage everyone in the room sees that all the styles work. There is no “you can’t get there from here.”

We are, of course, working toward some level of standardization in students’ finished drafts. That’s part of my responsibility as a teacher of writing. But the distance students have to travel from their current position of language-use to some shining ideal of correctness shouldn’t keep them from doing the idea-work that forms the most important part of writing. Creating an atmosphere where that can happen is another of my responsibilities.

And while this atmosphere is to some extent nurturing it is also intense, for students and for me. Everyone who volunteers or gets called on is momentarily in the spotlight, and I have to wield that spotlight in a way that challenges without bullying, that shows my expectations are high but attainable. I find the improvisational nature of all this to be energizing for me and instructive for them. Each thesis-in-progress has strengths and weaknesses, but what are they? And how to communicate them responsibly, usefully, and quickly in a public forum? As composition scholar Min-Zhan Lu has said, "{T]here is no better way to teach students the importance of negotiation than by allowing them the opportunity to watch a teacher work her way through a chancy and volatile dialogue."

The dialogue I'm describing isn't quite as chancy and volatile as the one Lu discusses (in "Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone"), but there are risks. When the plenary workshop  has gone less well, it's because I haven't adequately prepared students to work with the concepts the activity is trying to teach. I recently ran it during a unit on proposal writing to help them isolate the causes and effects of the problems they had chosen, and while it was useful, it would have been better if we'd done more preparatory work on the way causes and effects interact and are presented in a good proposal.

Returning to the “spotlight” metaphor: these plenary workshops are a kind of performance, and I think that’s what makes them such an effective contrast to group activities, especially when the latter have become expected and a little stale. We should encourage comfort but not apathy, which means shaking things up once in a while. Balancing contrasting activities is one way of doing this, and I'm hoping to add more of them.