Reading Reflection 4- Designing Groupwork

Chapter 1: "Groupwork as a Strategy for Classrooms"

• This chapter sets the tone and defines what groupwork is in the classroom. Groupwork is students working together in a group small enough so that everyone can participate. Students are free to accomplish their task in the way they think best, but they are accountable to the teacher for the final product. Students communicate with each other by asking questions, explaining, making suggestions, criticizing, listening, agreeing, disagreeing, or making joint decisions.
• This reminds me and re-emphasizes and re-iterates everything the credential program has taught and preached to us teacher candidates: Groupwork is one of the most effective teaching strategies for teachers to make content assessable to all students, to engage all students, and for student success in any content area. I have never participated and engaged in so much groupwork prior to entering the program. I have seen and now have a new outlook on groupwork.

Chapter 2: "Why Groupwork?"

• This chapter describes the pros and goals that groupwork will achieve in your classroom. It is trying to sell you to use groupwork in your classroom. It states that groupwork is an effective technique for achieving intellectual and social learning goals. Groupwork is superior for conceptual learning, for creative problem solving, and for increasing oral language proficiency. It is also a strategy for keeping students involved with their work, and managing instruction for students with a wide range of academic skills.
• My goal for clinical practice 2 is to incorporate more group work activities and opportunities for my students to engage in. Sometimes I struggle with creating a variety of types of group work in a mathematics classroom, but my math methods class has allowed me to see and interact with different approaches to cooperative learning. Thus, I hope my cooperating teaching (CT) will allow me to try and experiment with these techniques. From what I have seen, my CT includes very little groupwork opportunities for her students.

Chapter 3: "The Dilemma of Groupwork"

• This chapter describes some of the porblems and difficultities that can emerge within groupwork activities. Different types of agreed-upon "status" orientations can influence the success of a group in positive and negative ways. The different types of "status" are: status ordering, academic status order, peer status, and status characteristic.
• From personal experience working in groups, these "status" positions are present in many group settings. I am good at math, so if I was working in a group dealing with mathematics, I felt as though I could contribute more to the group. And if other students knew I was good in math, then they expected more from me to accomplish the task. Relating to peer status, if I was unfamilar with the peers in my group, then I was more quiet and reserved with my opinions. I think it is easier to work in a group, in which you know your members and their strengths and weakness.