Roles for Supporting Meaningful Group Work « Outside the Cave

Roles for Supporting Meaningful Group Work « Outside the Cave

Roles for Supporting Meaningful Group Work

by Stephen Lazar

A couple people have asked me recently for the structure I use to support group work in my history class, so I’d figure I’d share it here for all. I would only ask that if you use them, you let me know how things go, and especially any changes you make. But first, some context:
As a progressive educator, I was trained to value group work. However, for much of the beginning of my career, I had inconsistent success. Some tasks would go well; others would just result in students copying information from each other. Last year, I spent a lot of time thinking about what makes group work successful and what would make it unsuccessful. After attending a workshop at a conference on group work in math classes (I always find value in getting outside of my content areas to be able to encounter new paradigms to bring back to humanities), I came to the conclusion that in history classes, there were two types of “group-worthy” tasks:

1. When students have a complex problem to solve with multiple entry points, various potential strategies to