One of my favorite reflection programs is the “Start-Stop-Continue” exercise. It encourages learners to consider the impact of what they are learning by asking about their perceived impact. The teacher or facilitator completes a lesson or sequence of instructions, then stops and asks their audience to consider what they are going to start doing, stop doing, or continue doing based on the learning experience.
An example of how this structure influenced my growth occurred after I participated in a series of professional learning communities (plc) focused on collaborative learning. I teach at the middle school level, and while collaborative learning can and should take place at any grade level, it is especially important at the middle school level because adolescent learners need support as they encounter more complex emotional and social situations for the first time.
Based on what I’ve learned from PLCs and the impact of these strategies in the classroom, I’ve committed to starting, stopping, and continuing a number of things about collaboration, each of which has had a profound impact on how I view work time in a project-based learning (PBL) setting.
Getting Started: Distinguishing Group Work from Team Work
Calling project work time “group work” is a bit of a misnomer. I once heard a colleague of mine, who happens to be an experienced Little League coach, explain the importance of this distinction in a very clever way: “There’s a reason we call them baseball teams and not baseball groups.” His point is that teams don’t invest in the long-term success of their partners, whereas team members recognize that individual efforts contribute to the success of all and therefore invest more.
This distinction is important because it reminds teachers to provide a temporary grouping structure throughout the course of an assigned project, one that is different from the team that produces the final product. There are many benefits to this, but here are three that I have noticed.
- It provides students with different perspectives and solutions that may exist outside of the project team.
- It allows the instructor to utilize protocols that may require pairs, trios, or larger groups than the project team may provide.
- It allows students to take a break from the person they work with the most. This is sometimes critical to continued harmony in the classroom, especially at the middle school level where relationships and hormones seem to change with the tide.
Stop: Assuming Cooperation is Built from Experience Alone
Having students learn in groups is not the same as teaching them to work together. It’s like teaching someone to swim by throwing them into a lake and yelling at them from a distance until they learn how to swim; it’s a skill development born out of desperation, and there are definitely less stressful ways to learn.
I believe that in any program that requires teamwork, especially early on, specific, teacher-directed opportunities to carefully develop collaborative skills should be provided. You want students to have the opportunity to follow Tuckman’s stages of group development before grades add extra pressure to the experience. By giving them time to get riled up and regulated before the deadline, you set them up for a chance to succeed.
This can be accomplished with a short group challenge that comes with a quality assessment tool, such as a title that clearly articulates what good teamwork looks like. Books like the camp classic Silver Bullet or the evidence-based rules on the PBLWorks website are worthwhile resources. Developing students’ collaborative skills takes planning, but it doesn’t require adding a full day to a PBL program. Finding some place to have a 15- to 20-minute experience at the beginning of the day will have the greatest impact.
Continue: Adding Student Voice to Grouping
The question of whether or not to allow students to choose their own groups for collaborative learning is a common one. While student choice can promote positive classroom culture and engagement, students don’t always make grouping decisions based on who is their most effective learning partner. That said, I was and still am an advocate for occasionally allowing students to have some say in their groups, but that doesn’t mean a complete lack of structure, or scaffolded control.
Groups and teams should be formed as a joint effort. Sometimes you are the one making the decisions, sometimes you allow students some degree of choice, but mostly it is in a shared process.
An example of this would be allowing students to choose roles and then the teacher forming groups based on those roles based on those choices. Another example might be allowing them to submit the names of partners they want to work with, and then forming a final group by putting two pairs together. They could also choose the type of final product they want to create.