Assigning and evaluating group work
I know it’s a really sexy title, but @ariamuse and I have been having a conversation back and forth on messenger lately about how to assign group work that is useful, productive, and engaging AND at the same time, making that work something that all students will participate in. Heads’ up: this is a long text post, so if it’s not your thing, scroll along, no hard feelings. It seems like a lot to set up, but once you do it a couple of times, it will become second nature.
I thought I could show you what I used to do, and if it’s helpful, feel free to use it, yourself. If it matters, I taught International Baccalaureate English in grades 11 and 12 in a Title 1 school that was 95% free and reduced lunch.
Okay, so for this example, we start by reading the one act Master Harold and The Boys as a class. This works for any text you’ll read in English classes, and can be modified to work with History and Science classes too. It’s very flexible and very forgiving.
As with everything we read in my classes, I created and handed out a reading schedule (the pages we’d read each day, with anything extra to be read as homework) and the motifs we’d be annotating for with post-it notes as we went along. By the end of our reading of the play, every student’s book would be a forest of tiny post it flags (and no, I didn’t give them the expensive actual post it flags, I prepped ahead of time and chopped up full size post its so that I could give each kid a pile) covered in tiny notes that said things like “ballroom dancing, literal,” “ballroom dancing, figurative,” “apartheid!,” “parenting,” and anything else that they chose to look for, or things that jumped out at them. You’ll see the rest of the list in a moment.
It’s a one act, so we got it read and annotated in about a week, with 54 minute classes Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, and 42 minute classes on Wednesday.
We’d spent a lot of time talking as a class, acting it out together, and oohing and aahing and gasping over what happens, but I couldn’t assess a kid’s understanding just as a class group, so then I’d assign this:
Socratic seminars were my favorite, favorite way to figure out how well a student absorbed what we’d learned in class. They’re nearly impossible to fake your way through, they require evidence-based text questions, and they play well with small group working dynamics.
If you check out the Discussion Guidelines up there, you’ll see that I make it clear up front that the kids are graded not just on how well they prep their own questions, but how well they participate in the discussions of the other students in their group. Without that cooperation, the whole thing falls apart, so they’re all in this together, and they all know they have to be a team to be successful.
I’d make small groups of four or five or six students each, depending on the size of the class. These groups would be the Socratic groups on the day of the presentation. I usually let the kids pick for themselves, though a randomizer would work too (back in the day, I used colored Popsicle sticks, but you get the drift)
To assign topics, in my early years of teaching, I’d put the topics up on the overhead projector and let kids come up to write their names with overhead pens on the transparency (I know that’s a very old fashioned sentence, but roll with me); in the last four years, I had a SmartBoard, and so I did the same thing there. Each small group could only have one kid per topic, so when a Socratic group sat back down after sign-ups, one kid would be Parenting, one kid would be Ballroom Dancing, another Hypocrisy, and so on.
We’d talk about what makes a good seminar question: how to write open ended questions based on the text that sparked discussion, and how to put the questions in order that would lead the group to an aha! moment (aka the thesis of what the leader was trying to get them to without actually telling them). I’d model bad and good examples on the SmartBoard so that we were all on the same page.
Students would learn and practice the art of planning with the end in mind just like with their essays, and how our thesis equation that I had as a poster in class (Title of text + literary device + so what?! = thesis) was just as applicable in the way they communicated with their mouths as with their writing.
Then I’d hand out the scoring rubric and we’d go over what everything meant. I used the same rubric for all presentations, and it’s adapted from the IB English curriculum which is standard across all IB schools, but in my experience can be successful anywhere because it’s so logical:
You’ll notice that with just a little tweaking, this would also be a dandy rubric for written work. Just adjust “presentation” to cover the subject matter instead of time use, and you’re good to go. At the end, I’d give points out of 5 for each category for each kid, divide by 20, and get their percentage grade from that.
Ok, so now everyone has their topics, but they can’t very well spend the week planning questions sitting with the people they’re going to be asking them of, right? Right. Because there’s a social aspect to all group work, the natural act of chatting as they go would ruin any surprise element and therefore mess up the conversational dynamics on Seminar day.
So what I did was I (pardon the jargon, but your assessing admin will eat this up with a spoon) unjigsawed the Socratic groups, and rejigsawed the kids who had the same topics together.
So for the days we did seminar prep, all the Ballroom Dancers sat together, poring over their texts, talking over what this example meant and what that example meant, and did it support their thesis (and they all had to have different thesis statements, which I checked in with them about on the first day, before they could go any farther. Little benchmarks like that are a good way to make sure everyone has a plan in mind, and a good way to make sure that everyone’s on track to meet the deadline. You can make up your own that fits your needs), and writing questions, bouncing ideas off each other, and figuring out how to put the questions in a cascading order to get their group to figure out the thesis at the end. And all the other topic groups did the same thing too.
(There’s a kid, by the way, in every class who thinks they can BS their way through this, and that kid will unfailingly be the one, on Seminar day, who breezes through the four questions they were sure would take up ten minutes and they only take two, and then they have to figure out how to make things right. Because silence is a grade killer.)
So the students get all prepped, and come Seminar day, they sit with their original Socratic groups, the one where everybody has a different topic. Your classroom will be a bunch of small circled up desks so that everyone can hear what’s happening in their own small group (this, by the way, is a much kinder assessment for your introverted kids; students who might quail and quit before doing a full-class presentation are usually fine talking with a small group of 3 or 4 other peers).
I ask for volunteers to go first, set a timer for 8-10 minutes (however the class period time breaks up so that every kid in each small group gets a turn before the bell rings) on the Smart Board (or in the early years, the kitchen timer I brought from home), and tell them to begin.
Then I’d walk around the classroom listening in on the discussions in each circle, holding my clipboard and pen, taking notes on sheets that look just like the rubric up there, but with all the fields blank. So at the end of class, I’d have notes on how every kid did with Selection of Topic, Knowledge and Understanding, Presentation, and Language.
When the timer went off, we’d rotate around to the next kid in each circle, and start the timer and the next Seminar begins. The room will be full of buzzing and conversation. Three of four different topics will be talked about at once, so this is where your amazing teacher hearing comes in handy. You’ll see tight little circles of kids eagerly talking about the significance of why Hally gets left on that bench, and how it’s not a coincidence that Sam chose ballroom dancing, of all things, to be his life’s passion.
By the end of the class, if there’s any time left, I offered it to students who ran out of time, or who had ideas they wanted to share that came to them like a bolt out of the blue while they were working together.
I collected their questions at the end of class, and as I graded their written work (which contributed to each category of the rubric), I’d staple the now-filled-in rubric to their papers for handing back.
It’s not time-consuming to grade when you use a rubric, which makes for a quick turn around time, is a winner for every one.
Phew. Ok. I think I remembered everything. Anybody still here? Anybody?
If you have any questions, please let me know. Socratic Seminars were, without fail, one of my favorite parts of teaching, and as a bonus, your assessing admin will LOVE walking into a room where every kid is engaged, every kid is talking about the text and using text evidence to prove ideas, and every kid is groaning when the timer goes off and begging for more time because they just had an idea they’re dying to share.
