This will be a long message but I hope it’s helpful to someone.
Yesterday I sent a message about how I was having trouble with a couple of students who had “checked out” of their group. They felt the teams were rushing through the assignment and they felt left behind because they weren’t following what was going on. Nearly in tears, one told me that she had resigned herself to this method not working for her and she would just have to learn it all on her own. I didn’t know what to do to resolve it...do I intervene with the group and tell them to do their job and help out their teammate or let them resolve it on their own?
Larry Michaelsen called me (thanks again!) and we talked a bit about it. As I sort of suspected, the problem really was me and my team assignments. I had given them tasks that I thought would lead to discussion, but in reality led to the strongest doing the work for the rest.
My mistakes:
1. Too focused on numerical answers instead of conceptual answers. I thought since they had to figure out how to work the problems, that would stimulate discussion. Wrong.
2. I gave them a long list of problems to solve. The groups all worked them independently and turned them in when complete. No simultaneous reporting because I couldn’t figure out how to do it. This led them to feel rushed and they hurried through rather than working together.
3. One day they didn’t get immediate feedback because I had graded the assignment (20 groups!) and I learned my lesson there. The next day I figured out how to use a quiz on moodle for them to input their answers, but there was still no between group interaction and they still rushed through.
So I had an inspiration this morning. I changed today’s assignment to a multiple choice with very conceptual answers (they still had to be able to work the problems but the answer choices had some “why” instead of “how much”). I briefly modeled how to work a problem of this sort before they began. The big changes:
1. I told them to work one problem, then stop.
2. We used clickers to register the answers for each team (so one person per team used the clicker)
3. Before I revealed the results of the clicker, I had them hold up their answers. Before the term started, I had made laminated cards with big letters on them for this purpose, but I hadn’t figured out how to use them yet. So, they were on the hook with their answer before they saw how the overall class did.
4. Most of the time, they all had the same answer. If not, I asked someone to defend their team’s answer. I only had a couple of times where this happened but you could feel the energy in the room!
5. I then revealed the bar graph and had them move on to the next question. I’m sure some groups were working ahead but they all knew they would be reporting at the same time.
6. After they finished this “quiz” part, I gave them a more complicated problem to work, telling them we would “quiz” over it the same way on Friday but they needed a head start as it would take more time and was more challenging.
The difference was amazing. I watched for these “problem” students to see how they did in their teams and they were much more animated and involved. Team members were explaining things to them. It was great. I asked one of them after class and she said it was completely different today and she was grinning from ear to ear.
Another group remarked to me that they thought it was much better today with everyone getting the same feedback at the same time. They missed one of the questions and they felt that would really make that point stick with them.
So, to sum up, just like the book says, if you do the team assignments incorrectly, you get bad results! I feel much better about the process and I feel I finally clicked into a good format for the team assignments. Whew!
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John Mark Jackson, OD, MS, FAAO
Southern College of Optometry
(901) 722-3314
Skype: jacksonsco
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