My response is embeded within the below email.
Scott
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As I said in a previous post, I have many questions. I believe it would be best if I only asked a few at a time, so I'll start with these:
1. How much work is done by the groups outside of class? One problem I would encounter in a high school group is that many students do not have the means to drive somewhere. I'm afraid, though, if I chose my groups based on where students live, that I would lose some of the diversity. (I live in a very large district in terms of land area.) At the beginning of the year, I have students line up by their favorite subject. Science first, Math second, History third, English forth. I have student count off by 4 and this is their groups for the first unit. The next unit, I put students into different groups by grades. Two higher achievers & two lower achievers in each group.
Most work is done in class, this is made possible by front loading information for ~3 chunks of material per unit. The front loading makes it possible to cover the state required material, while grading primarily on students ability to apply it.
2. How do you keep groups from passing answers to later classes? I'm not thinking about multiple choice answers, because that would be easy to solve. I'm thinking more like a lab result. Maybe I have a group work in the lab to identify a substance, and this might be an experiment I cannot change for each class, so the answer would be the same. (I think this would qualify as a team-based activity, since I could have simultaneous reporting of the answer, which could lead to a lot of disagreement. Right?) Anyway, this would be an easy answer to give to a friend.
Maybe I can only do this with experiments that can be slightly changed, but that would really complicate my life!
I don't give any class the answer to any team challenge until EVERY group has completed the challenge. Your exactly right, the first few times I did team challenges classes would share the answers with other classes.
Thanks,
Karen Hoff
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