How to Work as a Student Team or Group
10 Tips for Working in Student Teams, by Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D.
"Learning to work in teams is vital to academic and career and job success. The key to successfully working in student teams is following these 10 tips." Read this great short essay on teamwork here. |
Using Assigned Roles in Group Work (taken from The Teaching Centre, 2019 & lightly edited for EFL learners) Assigning group roles can be a beneficial strategy for successful group work design for a number of reasons: Focused Interactions Participants are more likely to stay on task and pay closer attention to the task at hand when their roles in the collaboration are clear and distinct. Clear Participation Students are less likely to feel left out or unengaged when they have a particular duty that they are responsible for completing. Individual Accountability Group members are more likely to hold each other accountable for not completing work if a particular task is assigned to them. Stronger Communication Group roles allow students to build their communicative skills, especially in areas that they are less confident in volunteering for. Break Sterotyping Group roles can help disrupt stereotypical and gendered role assignments, which can be common in group learning. (for example, one study showed that female engineering students tended to undertake less technical roles and more communicative roles than their male colleagues.) |
Traditional Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) Roles
Facilitator: Manages the group by helping to ensure that the group stays on task, is focused, and that there is room for everyone in the conversation. Recorder: Keeps a record of those who were in the group, and the roles that they play in the group. The recorder also records critical points from the small group’s discussion along with findings or answers. Spokesperson: Presents the group’s ideas to the rest of the class. The Spokesperson should rely on the recorder’s notes to guide their report. Reflector: Observes team dynamics and guides the consensus-building process (helps group members come to a common conclusion). Other Roles You Could Add Encourager: Encourages group members to continue to think through their approaches and ideas. The Encourager uses probing questions to help facilitate deeper thinking, and group-wide consideration of ideas. Questioner: Pushes back when the team comes to consensus too quickly, without considering a number of options or points of view. The questioner makes sure that the group hears varied points of view, and that the group is not avoiding potentially rich areas of disagreement. Checker: Checks over work in problem-solving contexts before the group members finalize their answers. |